Chapter 11
The alarm sounded. I threw back the covers and jumped out of bed.
I pulled on my sweatshirt and running shorts, grabbed my headphones, and headed out.
The dawn air held the overnight chill, a surprise against my skin, still waking.
A soft white light bled out from the horizon, the sun just starting to emerge.
I jogged in place for a minute, warming myself up, blowing into my hands.
I fiddled with the headphones, running the cord under my shirt.
I clicked on the stopwatch and took off.
The music kicked on, low but rising, encouraging me forward.
I swooped through the still-deserted dawn streets of downtown Sawyer.
The town was pretty in the empty silence, all potential and promise.
At the western edge, I turned south, opposite campus.
I flew beneath an underpass, the first spring buds of March pushing from a patch of dirt on the other side.
The town fell away and I moved along fields.
Some farmers were up, preparing for the growing season.
I passed one I saw most mornings; our schedules had synced.
I had invented an entire life story for him: parents who died young, leaving him the farm; a wife who toiled beside him; three kids they’d saved up to send to college.
From his tractor, Harold (I had named him Harold) raised his arm in a still wave.
I lifted my hand in reply and skimmed by.
In the third mile, I picked up the pace, ignoring the pinch in my lungs.
Sweat slicked my body, pouring down my face and sticking my clothes to me.
I pressed on. Paved roads gave way to dirt.
I did not stop moving until I closed the loop, just over eight miles, arriving back at my building, bent forward, one hand against the wall, wracked and panting, my side split in two.
Back in my apartment, in the small book I kept by the door, I made note of my time.
Forty-seven seconds better than the day before.
Six weeks of this daily run; I was getting close to the best time of my peak period in college, before grad school ate my life and I lost the discipline.
I stripped and stepped into the shower. The shock of its icy force seized my body.
In the kitchen, I made coffee. I scrambled some eggs, scooping them onto a piece of toast. I ate over the sink and when I finished, I washed the crumbs down the drain.
Each day began like this, exactly like this.
I had whittled my life down to the bone of it.
I slept, I ran, I ate, I worked, I ate, I slept.
I was focused, purifying—a clarified light, everything else filtered out.
This was it. My life at Sawyer had disassembled with so little effort, it was almost sad.
But I did my best to keep ahead of such thoughts.
When they surfaced and caught up with me—a memory of Tyler in bed; the impulse, when coming upon an unintentionally hilarious line in a student paper, to text Safie and share it—I dove back into work, or lengthened my running stride, or turned up the cold in the shower; those remainders of my previous life vanquished.
I wasn’t exactly unhappy, though. While I used to find the monotony of academic life and the smallness of Sawyer stifling, now that constriction comforted.
I took an inverse pleasure in my new ascetic existence and its lack of anything extraneous.
Each day, an atonement. Each day, one more day without speaking to or seeing Tyler.
Another twenty-four hours of distance between us.
Almost the entirety of my existence unfolded inside my apartment.
I worked on the book, revising and reorganizing, filling in gaps in arguments, checking back against source materials.
I went to campus only when necessary. I would arrive just a minute before class, hold office hours in the hallway, and then return immediately home.
I had skipped out on every meeting—the monthly departmental ones and a school-wide emergency assembly to address a growing “plagiarism epidemic.” My no-show approach garnered increasingly incensed messages from Susan, her outrage escalating with each abstention.
Let me remind you, read her most recent email, participation in the life of the department is an obligation of your position and is weighted accordingly in the tenure review process.
None of your colleagues approach it as a matter of whimsy.
The last bit struck me as homophobic—I couldn’t see Susan accusing Colin, say, of engaging in whimsy.
But I replied to this as I did to all the others.
Thank you for the message. I will keep this in mind.
Mark. While it is true that I took some satisfaction in imagining Susan unraveling upon receipt, I was not trying to stir the pot.
Far from it. I just wanted to disappear.
I knew I was tanking my chances at Sawyer, but I saw this as a kind of insurance policy: It meant I had no option but to land a new job.
I was happy with the progress of the book, even excited about getting it to the editor to review.
I reached out to anyone from grad school I thought might remember me to say I was going back on the job market in the fall.
If you hear of anything, I’d copied and pasted from email to email, I would be very grateful if you let me know.
That evening, I prepared for a trip to campus.
Each year the department rotated responsibility for supervising senior thesis projects, and this year the assignment landed with me.
Susan had sent two or three messages checking up on me.
I resented her attempts to micromanage and deleted the emails without replying, although I had been sitting with the students every week.
We met in a study room I booked in the Chemistry building because I knew I would run into nobody there.
I had been to my office only twice, at the start of the semester.
The first time, on a deserted Sunday afternoon, to collect some books and whatever papers I needed for the term; and again the following Sunday, to guiltily retrieve the plant I had left to die on the windowsill.
I supervised nine students and we met together as a group.
While this was to limit my trips to campus, I told them it was to “facilitate cross-fertilization.” (I lifted that phrase from an email about a workshop offered by the Center for Teaching Excellence; I did not attend the workshop but I did read the email.) I didn’t mind the meetings, though.
The thesis was a requirement for honors and the students were earnest and hardworking.
They trickled in and I listened as they talked among themselves.
News about acceptances to grad programs, efforts to line up summer internships, complaints about unreliable internet in the dorms. Two students shared competing rumors about the lead in the spring play, who had abruptly withdrawn from classes and flown home.
(“Her roommate says her parents made her because of an eating disorder, but I don’t know, she’s not even that skinny.
”) When the group had fully assembled, I had each give a status report on their projects and identify one issue they wanted to workshop with the group.
We were approaching the midpoint of the semester, spring break almost upon us, and so they were starting to feel some pressure.
The collective anxiety mounted as they took their turns, each feeling they were in worse shape than the student preceding them.
Sometimes higher education seemed good for nothing besides multiplying insecurities and intensifying feelings of inadequacy.
I did my best to reassure them. “This is why we’re here,” I said, “to get you where you want to be. We’ll figure it out together.
” I wanted to add that, in the grand scheme of things, these projects didn’t really matter.
But they had invested so much of their young identities, I didn’t want to minimize the experience.
We made our way back around, problem-solving each student’s thesis.
About halfway through, my phone dinged with a message.
I didn’t think to turn it off for these meetings; I never heard from anyone.
I glanced and was taken aback—it was Stephen.
We’d had no contact all these months. As I did with Safie, I’d looked up his teaching schedule on the registrar’s website, so I could better avoid a run-in.
I couldn’t imagine why he’d reach out. An anxious loop of questions distracted me the rest of the session.
I rushed the students through to the end, insisting they had no reasons to worry.
After the last of the students cleared the room, I opened the text:
Hi Mark, I hope you’re doing okay. I know we didn’t part on great terms but I was wondering if we could meet for coffee or something. I’d like to talk.