The Visiting Professor

by Robert Littell

  “Like they are speaking a foreign language,” Rain explained to Norman.

  “Uh-huh,” Norman said. He turned toward me. “Sheriff’d like to know where you’re at. The gypsy in Schenectady who reads entrails, the blind Romanian lady in Long Branch who reads tarot cards, they’ve both thrown in the sponge. You and the defrocked Catholic priest who dangles a ring over a map are the only two still looking for the perpetrator.” Norman flashed a boyish grin. “Asides the police.”

  I made a mental note of “throw in the sponge,” the meaning was clear from the context, and started to leaf through the two file folders Norman had brought over. “When you see the sheriff,” I told him, “say him I am getting warmer.”

  Norman took a gulp of lukewarm coffee, decided to add more sugar, as if sweetness could compensate for coldness, then took another gulp.

  “You’re getting warmer,” he repeated.

  “Warmer to knowing whether the killings are random or not.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  After Norman left I borrowed Rain’s Harley, kicked the motor over and ran Axinya back to the motel across the Backwater town line.

  “Welcome to the cockroach motel,” I told her as we pulled up in front of her cabin. “You check in, you do not check out.”

  “You’ve changed,” Axinya said. “You used to act dirty, but you never talked dirty.” She leaned forward and fitted her lips against mine. In Russia this had passed for kissing. “Come home,” she whispered breathlessly. “Here you are a fish out of water.”

  I disengaged her arms as gently as I could and backed toward the Harley. “I will swim when and where I will swim.”

  “What keeps you here?” she wanted to know. Her voice had the plaintive quality the Russian language tends to take on when you ask questions to which you know the answers.

  Two cabins down a porch light snapped on and the Oriental man I had run into at the E-Z Mart stuck his head out a door. “If you absolutely must quarrel,” he called in his clipped British accent, “might I be so bold as to suggest you save it for the A.M. when you will both be fresher.”

  I kicked the Harley until it jumped under me and gunned the motor. Axinya must have repeated her question, I could see her lips mouthing the words “What keeps you here?” With the Harley roaring in my ears, I mouthed words back at her. In Russia, I tried to tell her, I used to stand around waiting for good news. Then I stood around waiting for news. Then I stood around waiting for death. Over the years my ankles had swelled. My heart, too.

  The last memory I have of Axinya, as I drove off on the Harley, was the perplexed expression on her face, which led me to suspect that my message had been garbled in transmission.

  Hey, lip reading is not easy. Heart reading neither.

  When he gets back to the apartment, Lemuel finds the projector covered with mauve silk turned on and Rain sitting stark naked in a yoga position on the only bed in the only bedroom. He takes a long look at her hips, her breasts, decides they look perfectly female to him. Rain has switched off one of the two bed lamps and set the other on the floor, a signal she is expecting sexual activity.

  “Like what’s your position on yogurt?” she asks.

  “In Russia, everyone thinks people who eat yogurt live longer.”

  Rain seems relieved. “I once read in this women’s magazine where you don’t get something called a yeast infection if you douche with yogurt, so from time to time that’s what I go and do.”

  In the shadowy light of the bed lamp on the floor, Lemuel slips into a mouth-watering fiction. The Siberian night moth under Rain’s right breast is fluttering its wings, almost as if it is beating off a swarm of freckles. …

  “About the yogurt,” Rain says with that half-defiant, half-defensive smile that Lemuel has come to recognize as her badge of insecurity, “you could think of it as a midnight snack.”

  Which is how Lemuel finally comes face to face with a part of the female body he has not been to before. Which is also how he comes to savor, he is sure it must have happened before, he only cannot remember when, a getting there as well as a going.

  Occasional Fucking Rain!

  Freshly shaven, the usual patch of toilet paper clinging to the usual coagulated cut on his chin, his cheeks reeking from a few dabs of Rain’s rose-scented toilet water, Lemuel drifts at midmorning down South Main Street, past the post office, the drugstore, the pool hall, the bookstore. Overnight their facades have been whitewashed and splashed with psychedelic graffiti depicting in lurid detail the invasion of Backwater by Martians, the theme of this year’s Spring Fest. Bands of Martians, their faces grease-painted the color of grass, their ears pasted back and pointed, their heads aflutter with rubber antennas glued to the bones above their eyes, scramble along the narrow paths of the long hill that dominates the village, shrieking unintelligible syllables of an invented language as they storm dormitories and leap out of ground-floor windows brandishing the spoils of interplanetary war: panties, brassieres, crinoline slips once the personal property of coed earthlings.

  On the lawn in front of the bank across the street from Lemuel, the electronic billboard, instead of time and temperature, is flashing an inspirational communique: “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

  Lemuel has no illusions about the universality of the message. As far back as he can remember, it has been too late to have a childhood, forget happy. Beyond that point, events are veiled in a shifting haze that occasionally dissipates long enough for him to catch a glimpse of something he does not want to see …

  “Golbasto momaren evlame gurdilo shefin mully ully gue!” a fraternity brother Lemuel remembers seeing at the Delta Delta Phi bash yells to a Martian friend as the two trot past the billboard.

  “Tolgo phonac,” the boy shouts back.

  “Tolgo phonac,” the first Martian agrees with a horselaugh.

  From the carillon tower on the wood line of the hill comes a raucous peal of bells. Beating the air with their wings, dozens of pigeons nesting in the top of the tower swarm into the sky. Martians have occupied the carillon tower and are belting out what the Backwater Sentinel identified as the Spring Fest’s official anthem, a melody that sounds suspiciously familiar to Lemuel. It hits him where he has heard it before: Rain has played it on her French horn. “Oh, when the saints, come marching in,” Lemuel sings in time to the carillon bells, “Oh when the saints come march-ing in, da da da, da da da da-da, when the saints come march-ing in.”

  Farther down the street there is a commotion as a cavalcade of convertibles, their horns drowning out the carillon bells, turns off Sycamore onto South Main. The cars, packed with Martians, proceed in a slow cortege down the white line of the wide street. A pickup truck with a television crew from a Rochester TV station filming from the back drives parallel to the cortege. Lining the sidewalks on either side of South Main, Martians cheer on two streakers sandwiched between the cars of the motorcade. As they jog past, wearing only sneakers, Dwayne, the E-Z Mart manager, and Shirley, his main squeeze, who turns out to have naturally wavy pubic hair, salute the crowd.

  Dwayne, his testicles and enormous penis flapping, catches sight of Lemuel. “Lem, babe, z’up?”

  “Yo. Nuch.” Lemuel tries to act as if chatting with a naked man jogging down South Main is an everyday occurrence. “Like I did not know you went in for jogging.”

  “Yeah, babe, I also do t’ai chi. A sound mind in a sound body, that’s my philosophy.”

  “It would be mine too,” Lemuel mutters, “if I still had my Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual.”

  “So I hear I’ll be seeing you later,” Dwayne calls over his shoulder.

  “Rain went and invited us up again for supper,” Shirley shouts in a high-pitched voice.

  The TV cameraman calls to her from the back of the pickup truck, “How about a big hello for the folks back home.”

  Laughing hysterically, covering her small pointed breasts with one arm, Shirley twists and waves to the television
camera with her free hand. She shouts back at Lemuel, “Whatcha say after supper I teach you how to write your name backwards?”

  “Rock ’nnnnn’ roll,” Dwayne yells into the television camera, raising his fist.

  An echo comes from the Martians in the open cars. “Rock ’nnnnn’ roll.”

  Lemuel meanders into the Kampus Kave. The waitress, whose name is Molly, looks up from her comic book. “Well, if it ain’t Mr. One With, One Without,” she says. “With ya in a jiffy.”

  Lemuel notices the Rebbe in a booth near the back, slides onto the bench across from him. The Rebbe, looking like death warmed over, is carving into the tabletop with a small bone-handled penknife.

  “So what are you writing?” Lemuel wants to know.

  “Yod, he, waw, he. Which spells ‘Yahweh.’ “ The Rebbe raises his bulging eyes heavenward, focuses on the three-blade ventilation fan hanging from the ceiling directly above him, daring God to strike him dead for pronouncing His sacred name out loud.

  Molly sets two cups of coffee in front of Lemuel. “One with, one without,” she says with a straight face. (It has become their little joke.) She angles her head to get a better look at the Rebbe’s handiwork. “I don’t mind folks carving initials in my tables, everyone does it, it’s more or less traditional,” she says, “but given the fact we’re in the U.S. of A., it seems to me it ought to be in English.”

  “You’ll maybe make an exception for the name of God?”

  “Jesus, born in a manger in Bethlehem, is the name of God.”

  “Jesus, who almost certainly wasn’t born in Bethlehem, that story had the rug pulled out from under it by biblical scholars, is the name of the son of God. I’m carving the name of His Father who art in heaven.”

  Molly watches the Rebbe etching the unfamiliar letters into the wood. “My first husband, may he rest in peace, all of a sudden started in writing backwards after his stroke. I had to hold the paper up to a mirror to see what he wanted.”

  “In Hebrew,” the Rebbe says, “right to left is frontward.”

  “You’re having me on.”

  The Rebbe squints up at her. “Stop me if you’ve heard the old Jewish proverb I am about to invent. It’s the story of a man who’s agnostic, insomniac and dyslexic. He lies awake nights wondering if there is such a thing as a dog.”

  “If that there’s a joke, Rabbi Nachman, I sure don’t get it,” Molly admits.

  “ ‘Dog’ spelled backwards is ‘God.’ ”

  Molly purses her lips. “I don’t see what a dog has to do with God.”

  Shaking her head, she pushes through the swinging doors to the kitchen. Lemuel adds sugar to both cups of coffee, absently stirs the without as he sips the with. “You look very depressed, Asher. Hey, I hope your yeshiva deal did not fall through.”

  The Rebbe, contemplating a tragedy worse than the Holocaust, shakes his head. “It’s much more serious. There’s this passage in To-rah where Yahweh pulls Abraham outside the tent and points to the night sky. ‘Count the stars,’ He tells him. ‘So shall thy seed be.’ I’m talking Genesis 15:5. I was re-reading it yesterday when the tragic news hit me over the head like a ton of books.” The Rebbe, wringing his oversized pink paws in agony, glances up. Lemuel spots tears glistening in his eyes. “Don’t you see it? The number of stars in the sky is fixed, not endless. Which means Yahweh is telling Abraham he’ll have a fixed, not an endless, number of descendants. What Yahweh is saying—my God, I could kick myself I didn’t see it before, I could kick myself harder for seeing it now, who needs this kind of information rattling around in his brain?—is that the Jewish people will come to an end one day.”

  “New stars are forming from primordial gases all the time,” Lemuel says.

  The Rebbe perks up. “Are you sure of your information?”

  “Sure I am sure. Only last week astronomers published photographs of fifteen embryonic stars in the Orion Nebula. Out in the infinite reaches of space, stars are dying and being born every day of the week, every hour of the day.”

  A sigh of relief bursts from the Rebbe’s lips. “Oy, that was a close call. I feel like a condemned man who just got a last-minute reprieve.”

  The Rebbe folds away his pocketknife, irons the wrinkles out of a dollar bill with his palm, weighs the bill down with the small metal container filled with toothpicks, swipes some sugar cubes from the bowl. “Lucky for the Jews I ran into you today,” he tells Lemuel as he slides off the bench and slumps toward the street.

  Lemuel has finished the with and is taking his first sip of the lukewarm without when the squat Oriental man who berated him for arguing with Axinya at the cockroach motel approaches the booth. He is wearing a three-piece pin-striped suit and carrying an umbrella in one hand and an attaché case in the other.

  “Do you mind?” he asks, speaking with a clipped, upper-class British accent.

  Lemuel peers up into his Buddha face. “Do I mind what?”

  “Do you mind if I join you?”

  “Like it depends on what you are selling.”

  The Oriental man sits down in the Rebbe’s place, touches the freshly etched Hebrew letters with his fingertips as if he is reading Braille. “Yah-weh,” he says, sounding them out.

  “You speak Hebrew,” Lemuel notes in surprise.

  “I read languages at Oxford,” the Oriental man explains. “I speak seven Middle Eastern and Far Eastern tongues and twelve dialects. You are Lemuel Falk, the celebrated ramdomnist, are you not?”

  “Hey, celebrated, I do not know.”

  “You are unduly modest,” the Oriental man says in a soothing voice. “I would like to talk to you about the Data Encryption Standard used by the various agencies and organs of the United States government when they want to communicate with each other without having someone reading over their shoulders.”

  Lemuel starts to squirm out of the booth, but the Oriental man reaches across the table and clamps an iron grip on his wrist. “The Data Encryption Standard is based on a secret number, called the key, which is used to perform mathematical operations that scramble the message. Using the same key, the person receiving the message can unscramble it.”

  It dawns on Lemuel that the Oriental man has been shadowing him for days. He remembers seeing him at the checkout counter in the supermarket, he remembers seeing him again in the crowd watching Dwayne and Shirley streak down South Main, and he rented the cockroach motel room next to Axinya.

  “So I do not see what all this has to do with yours truly.”

  “Bear with me. To break a cipher, one must run a computer program designed to test every possible key until one of them turns in the lock and the door clicks open. My masters have been led to believe that you developed for your former employers a near-random system of enciphering that makes it practically impossible for a computer to stumble across the key. My masters also believe that having achieved this miracle of near randomness, you could certainly work backward and develop a computer program that could map intricate statistical variations in large samples of data, which is the weak link in even near randomness, and thus break any cipher being used in the world today.”

  With some effort Lemuel extracts his wrist from the grip of the Oriental man and offers one of his noncommittal grunts.

  “To make a long story only slightly shorter,” the Oriental man says, “I am authorized to offer you permanent employment.”

  “I have a job.”

  “When does your contract at the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies expire?”

  “Funny how everyone wants to know when my contract expires. End of May.”

  “What will you do then? Return to the saintly city of Petersburg and queue five hours a day in order to eat sausages fabricated out of dead dog?”

  “Is there an alternative?”

  Buddha’s eyes narrow as he feels the tug on his line and begins to reel it in. “You could live in the lap of luxury not far from London in a small rural community devoted to theoreti
cal mathematics. You could continue your quest for pure unadulterated randomness on our supercomputer. In your spare time you could give us the occasional helping hand in making or breaking ciphers. You could draw on a bank balance that has already been deposited in your name.”

  “What bank balance?”

  The Oriental man’s lips stretch into a guileless smile. He dials a number on the combination lock, snaps open the attache case, removes a passport and a bank book from it and sets them down on the table. Lemuel riffles through the passport, British, filled with entry and exit stamps from various countries. The passport contains a mug shot of him taken years before, and is made out in the name of Quinbus Flestrin. It occurs to Lemuel that if he owned this passport he would have not only two signatures, he would have two names. He sets the passport aside and opens the bank book, notices that someone with the unlikely name of Quinbus Flestrin appears to have £100,000 to his credit in a bank called Lloyds. He makes a quick calculation, realizes that £100,000 is the equivalent of roughly one hundred and fifty million rubles. Set for life, set for the next one too, Lemuel, flustered, blows across the surface of his lukewarm coffee to cool it, then to mask his confusion polishes it off in one long gulp.

  “Lest you doubt that our intentions are, as they say, honorable, I also have in my possession a first-class Rochester–New York–London airplane ticket made out in the name of Quinbus Flestrin,” the Oriental man adds.

  Lemuel clears his throat. “I am curious about something.”

  “You would be acting out of character if it were otherwise,” the Oriental man says with a Buddha-like flutter of his eyelids.

  “How did you discover I was in Backwater?”

  “I don’t suppose I would be treading on anyone’s toes if I were to tell you. My masters have been keeping track of a woman journalist who is free-lancing for the reconstituted Russian KGB. Her name is Axinya Petrovna Volkova. Nowadays, due to a severe shortage of foreign currency, Russian intelligence agents tend to cultivate fields close to home; they devote a great deal of time and energy to operations in the Ukraine, for instance, or Uzbekistan. So when one of their agents took a train across Europe, a boat across the Atlantic, then a bus to an out-of-the-way town in upstate New York, we naturally wanted to know what there could be in the backwater called Backwater to justify the expenditure of scarce hard currency. Which is how we stumbled across Lemuel Melorovich Falk, winner of the Lenin Prize for his work in the realm of pure randomness and theoretical chaos.”