Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  The demonstration had been planned well by somebody,

  because Tyler was now handcuffed to one of the metal bars that opened the doors to Parker, and another set of handcuffs acted like a chain by locking the bars together. Tyler looked rumpled, outraged, and dangerous, yanking furiously at the cuffs that would not release him. Students stood in a semicircle facing him, staring, muttering derisively, their signs drooping. This was clearly more satisfying than the task of marching and chanting, only what would they do next?

  Assault him?

  Betty and Bill Malatesta looked abashed enough when

  they saw me to make me believe this hadn’t been their idea.

  But who was in charge, then? No one seemed to be directing what was happening, which made me nervous and curious.

  There was a Jamie Lee Curtis scream from above us that silenced everyone standing outside Parker. We all looked up to see where it had come from.

  “It’s gone—it’s gone—it’s gone!” Dulcie was wailing.

  “My tree!”

  Puzzled students looked at each other, repeating the word “tree” as if it were code that needed deciphering.

  “Someone stole the Diversity Tree!” Dulcie cried, as

  horrified as if she’d been the victim of an assault.

  Around me, confusion didn’t just reign, it was creating a dynasty. “What the hell is a Diversity Tree?” came from several people. I didn’t bother explaining, not wanting to call more attention to myself, but the idea of anyone caring enough to steal the Diversity Tree was as ridiculous as the tree itself. Why bother?

  Sirens now hit us like bombs, and half a dozen campus police cars screeched into the parking lot, policemen pouring from them like Greeks from the Trojan horse, ready for savagery. I expected the crowd to disperse immediately as the police lined up at a distance in two groups of ten each, but no one left. The policemen had the blank, vaguely ominous look of any mass of uniforms, evoking images of power and

  repression. One of them resembled the officer on the scene of Juno’s accident, but I wasn’t sure.

  I tried squirming away from the crowd, but around me, people had drawn in more closely as if for protection and I started to feel smothered by the clashing smells of cigarette smoke, mothballed winter coats, and CK One. I looked around for the Malatestas but they had somehow slipped off.

  Wonderful. I was smack in the middle of what could turn into another fabled SUM riot—and would be late for class, if I didn’t get arrested.

  One of the campus policemen stepped forward and said

  quietly, “You need to disperse.”

  No one moved. I sensed an adamantine, sheeplike stubbornness that would have taken more than Babe and a magic formula to melt.

  “Officer!” Tyler Mooney-Mauser called. “No violence!

  Please!”

  Was that latent humanitarianism in him, fear, or just the typical administrator’s obsession with PR?

  Parker Hall’s windows were now as stuffed with

  spectators as an all-you-can-eat buffet. And when I craned my neck I could see that Serena was there, too, at the EAR

  office window. Could it get any worse? I was the only faculty participant in a student outrage targeted at the administration and sparked by Avis’s interview in the Tribune. After I had denounced Avis at the faculty meeting, my presence here would be considered intentional—that’s how it would be reported and gossiped about, no matter what I said or how I tried to deny it. This was the kind of imbroglio that didn’t just torpedo your tenure application, it could lead to being fired.

  But surprisingly, at the thought of being dismissed, and despite being pressed against on all sides, I suddenly felt as liberated as if Summerscale’s shout of “Freedom!” before really had meant something. Worrying about my security at SUM was a knee-jerk reaction, unworthy of this moment or any other. I surrendered, closed my eyes, and let my mind drift, assuming we were not about to become a byword for gun control. I heard traffic noise, panicky breathing, bare tree branches rubbing against themselves. The crowd was so closely packed that the air on my face and head felt even cooler, as if I were in a hot tub.

  “I’m okay!” Mooney-Mauser shouted, sounding far less anxious than before. Perhaps he had been having some quiet inner moments for himself. If that were the case, they didn’t last, because there were sharp cries of alarm around me, people jostling and scattering, a shout of “Look out!” and then a weird muffled crash, then another. The Diversity Tree had been flung from Parker Hall, maybe even from the roof, and everyone around me legged it as quickly as if they thought the tree were about to explode. It was a wonder nobody got trampled. Maybe they expected more shrubs to rain down on them from some maddened horticulture student, enraged by genetic engineering.

  With its ornaments bent, broken, drooping, the mangled Diversity Tree lying only ten feet away looked even more pathetic than it had on the EAR counter. From up above us, Dulcie leaned out the window wailing, as if she were a mother grieving her son’s loss and ready to throw herself into the grave. It was bizarre and excessive—but touching. I felt sorry for her; she had invested much more than I’d realized in the benighted plan. I just hoped there wouldn’t be copycat crimes at SUM and further assaults with a deadly sapling.

  Then I heard another strange sound, like a low whistle, and something shattered so close to me I thought I’d been shot at. I jumped back, as startled as when you turn a corner and see someone when you thought no one was there.

  Recovering from the surprise, I could see that around me lay fist-size chunks of sandstone that looked like bits of the ornamental coping around the roof. I stepped back to look at the roof but couldn’t see if a piece was missing. Judging from the rubble, what had fallen must have been as large as the head on a marble bust, more than enough to have hurt me after falling from three floors up. Had it come down

  accidentally following the tree, loosened by the activity up there—or was someone really trying to brain me?

  Tyler was shouting, “Get me out of here!” while several campus policemen were attending to the shackled, miserable-looking shnook, who had been forced by the cuffs to squat against the door. Other officers circled round Parker in two groups, evidently heading for the other entrances to trap the tree thief.

  They unlocked Mooney-Mauser’s handcuffs and helped

  him to his feet, dusted him off while he imperiously pointed at various scattered personal belongings—a phone, a fountain pen, a PalmPilot—that the police dutifully gathered up for him. With the doors also unbarred, he was led inside—to clean up? to make a statement?—and I decided to avoid Parker that day and head straight to class. But Officer Protopopescu approached me, asked if I was okay.

  “I thought that was you. Yeah, I’m fine.”

  He returned to the officers attending Mooney-Mauser,

  and I phoned Stefan en route and left a message that I was okay, it was all over, and I’d fill him in later. As I closed the phone and put it away, my hand was trembling, and I heard the crashing stonework again, wondering how close it had really come to hitting me. But I couldn’t dwell on that; I had students waiting for me. I hurried into the closest men’s room at Uplegger and, after taking a leak, noticed some reddish dust across my face. I’d obviously been closer than I realized to that piece of balustrade or whatever had fallen from Parker’s crumbling roof, or been hurled.

  It was too soon for my first class to have heard about the incident, but everyone in my second class already seemed to know something, which meant that I had a lot of rumors to deflate before we could start.

  “No, sorry. No fistfights. No blood. Nobody was

  kidnapped, not really. Nobody got pushed off the roof. Trust me, I was there.” That was a mistake, since my students clamored for details, and then we wasted half the class talking about Avis and Whiteness Studies, which most of my

  students thought was a joke, and who could blame them?

  “So, like, I could do a pap
er on Nine Inch Nails and

  suburban white teenage angst?” Todd, one of the livelier students, asked. “If this were a Whiteness Studies class?”

  “You can do one now.”

  “No, that’s cool, I’ll pass.” Everyone laughed.

  I called Stefan right after class from an empty classroom in Uplegger where I could feel private. Even he, with all his experience of SUM’s surrealism, had trouble believing me. I had to repeat each outrageous statement of fact: Yes, Tyler was picked up and passed along; yes, he was handcuffed to the door; yes, someone stole the Diversity Tree from EAR and tossed it onto the ground.

  Stefan wasn’t agog, he was Magog. “From a window?

  From the roof? Did you see who did it? Holy shit! Was it the same person who stole the tree, do you think? Well, you couldn’t know, could you? Tyler was really handcuffed? I don’t believe it!”

  He could have been a scandal junkie hungrily switching channels to find out the latest dish from D.C. It was a very repetitious conversation until I told him about the follow-up to the tree.

  “You think someone tried to warn you? To hurt you?” he said. “Or was it an accident?”

  “It was probably the Hunchback of Parker Hall—he ran

  out of boiling oil.”

  “Don’t joke about it. Stay away from Parker,” Stefan

  warned me, turning serious. “There could be more trouble.

  Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Before he hung up, he said, “How were your classes?”

  “Thanks for asking.”

  I know lots of professors don’t like teaching the same class back-to-back with only a twenty-minute break, but I enjoyed the challenge of making the material (when I was lecturing) different the second time around. That day, however, I was exhausted when classes and the phone call with Stefan were over, and I dragged myself back to my car.

  I would have gone straight there but ran into interference of a sort before I crossed over to Parker. Rusty Dominguez-St.

  John came striding along with a black leather knapsack slung over the shoulder of his fringed black suede jacket. Head high, chest out, and shoulders back, he could have been walking onto the set of a music video, with that glossy fake look of his, like someone about to lip-synch.

  “Nick, my man, are you self-destructive or what? Why

  didn’t you just shoot Tyler instead of chaining him to the doors?”

  “That wasn’t me! I was just a bystander.”

  “Right. Not the way I heard it.” He shook his head

  solemnly, then gave me a hideous, triumphant grin. That’s when I realized he was mocking me. And threatening me, too, reminding me he could say anything about me he wanted to, and that he probably would, just to blacken my name, which he didn’t regard in the slightest.

  “That is a sick joke,” I said. “Really sick.” What made him feel free enough to even say it—was I the scrawniest chicken in the yard, waiting to be pecked to death?

  He laughed and jauntily walked on as if nothing could touch him. Students stopped and looked at him, but I didn’t know if they were wondering who he was or wondering who he thought he was. Stefan’s advice to stay away from Parker before the morning’s events and even after was good, but something in Rusty’s mockery changed my mind about

  heading right home. Why should I be afraid of going to my office? Wasn’t that what he was trying to do with his mind games—make me more paranoid than I was already?

  I marched myself to Parker Hall, determined not to be intimidated by anyone. The mob scene hadn’t really been violent, so there was no trace of the morning’s frenzy, and the tree and stone debris were gone. I wondered if Dulcie had reclaimed the tree, and I pictured her woefully carrying it up the stairs in her arms, a piney Pietà. “The calla lilies are in bloom again,” I muttered, recalling Katharine Hepburn’s tear-jerker line from Stage Door.

  The basement was utterly quiet. Summerscale hadn’t

  built a Les Mis-style barricade across the middle of the hallway, and there weren’t any bare-breasted heroines waiting to lead a charge. Too quiet?

  Yes, indeed. Stickpinned to my door was a white

  business envelope of departmental stationery. My name was typed and underlined: Dr. Nick Hoffman. There was something derisory about the underlining. Dulcie, I thought.

  Who else? I pocketed the note, let myself into the office, and had sat down at my desk to read what could only be bad news when the phone rang.

  It was Juno. “Nick! What the hell is going on there? I’ve heard a dozen stories—a hundred stories—that you were beaten up, arrested, talked down from the roof when you threatened to jump, assaulted a campus cop—”

  “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  I glanced around the shabby office, thankful I hadn’t been there long enough to feel comfortable despite the grunge that paint and posters couldn’t really camouflage. I doubted I’d be sitting there much longer.

  “They’re going to fire me.”

  “Why? Did you do any of those things?” She sounded

  impressed.

  “Nothing. I didn’t do anything. I was just standing there when it got out of control.”

  “What did? Tell me what happened.”

  So once again I was reporting from the scene. I

  wondered how CNN’s Christianne Amanpour could stand it.

  Juno kept roaring with hoarse laughter as I told my

  story, then groaned. “Oh, Christ, it hurts, but it’s wonderful.

  Merry Glinka’s little bum boy stripped and chained. It’s fucking marvelous.”

  “Juno, he wasn’t stripped.”

  “Oh, yes he was, that little twat was stripped of his dignity. Every time people look at him, they’ll imagine him at the mercy of those students. Too bad it wasn’t Glinka herself, then she’d have to resign. It would be too shameful to stay.”

  “Administrators have no shame.”

  “Well…”

  “How are you feeling?” I wondered if she’d taken more painkillers than prescribed.

  “Glorious! One more story like yours, and I’ll be dancing a jig.” In the background I could hear Turandot barking, perhaps responding to Juno’s excitement, but Juno’s naked delight made me regret my own earlier enjoyment of Tyler’s predicament. Weren’t Juno and I both cruel? And

  shortsighted.

  “This is going to piss off Glinka and her gang,” I said.

  “And they’ll want revenge.”

  “Balls! They can steam all they want, but they can’t shit on minority students—it would look bad. They’ll weasel out of it. You’ll see.”

  “They’ll want a fall guy, someone to blame.”

  “Yes, it’s time for a human sacrifice—but perhaps it’ll be someone in the provost’s office, someone who should have known better.”

  “It’ll be me.”

  “Never.”

  I felt drawn to talking to Juno longer, for many reasons, but right then the most seductive one was delay. I didn’t want to open the envelope addressed to me because I was sure it had something unpleasant inside. Not the kind of virus terrorists might disperse on a subway train, but something almost as terrifying, and probably as lethal—for me, anyway.

  I told Juno I had to go, said I’d check in with her later, and hung up. I stared at the envelope, then ripped it open.

  On EAR letterhead, and fully addressed to me as “Dear Dr. Hoffman” as if I were a stranger, Serena Fisch had sent a brief message: “I must speak with you immediately.” It was signed, “Cordially.” I felt as chilled as a kid whose parents never use his full name when he hears it intoned from a distance, but I didn’t loiter in my office trying to convince myself that I needed to reorganize everything in my file cabinet. Face the music, I thought, even if it was going to be a dirge or Chopin’s Funeral March. I locked up and ascended to my doom.

  But as I climbed the stairs I flashed back to that
moment of exhilaration I’d felt outside Parker. Freedom. What was wrong with me? I wasn’t remotely doomed. I’d been in an inferior position so long as an untenured assistant professor that it had completely warped my thinking. The worst that would probably happen to me is that I’d be threatened with dismissal, and I could counter-threaten a lawsuit and we could turn the thing into an endless Dickensian wrangle. Or, more satisfyingly, I could come up with the academic version of “Take this job and shove it.”

  An atmosphere of perfervid grief hung over the main

  office, with the secretaries seated at their desks in attitudes of barely concealed prostration. You might have thought there had been a national disaster, or that they were the women of Corinth dreading Medea’s emergence from the home inside which she wailed about her betrayal by Jason and planned revenge. Clearly, I had underestimated what the tree meant; it was more important and more symbolic than I’d imagined.

  “I’m here to see Serena,” I announced.

  Dulcie gave me a smoldering glare from her mask-of—

  tragedy face and motioned for me to walk around the counter and enter the inner EAR suite, where Serena had her office.

  The scarred oak door, which didn’t quite fit its frame anymore since the building had settled so much, was closed. I knocked, and Serena told me to wait. Pettiness, or rage?

  “Come in, Nick,” she called after only half an eternity.

  The previous EAR chair had kept this large office

  drastically bland and bare, so that might be why Serena had gone in the opposite direction. The chair’s digs were now a kind of Pier One Casbah, the furniture draped with tasseled velveteen throws and pillows, the walls hidden behind deeply colored Pre-Raphaelite posters, the linoleum floor disguised by an Oriental-style rug, the paisley curtains as heavy as an SUM

  progress report, the lamps dimmed and softened with silk scarves. Though I couldn’t see any potpourri pots, the room had a musky perfumed smell.

  But Serena wasn’t about to offer me a glass of tea or some Turkish coffee in a tiny copper cup. And her face wasn’t just blank, it was cold and inhospitable. Charm wouldn’t work on her, only an ice-breaking ship.