7. Thomas
Thomas
I'd built the pretext over the weekend, and I want it on the record that it was a good pretext.
New faculty inherit graduate seminars with no file: no prior syllabi, no reading lists, no roll.
All true. So I asked the registrar's office for the enrollment of the Letters graduate seminar, spring term, last academic year, so that I could reconstruct what my students had already covered and stop assigning them books they'd written papers on.
Administrative. Beige. The kind of request that gets granted by a man who is already thinking about his lunch.
The man was named Ballard, senior clerk, half-glasses on a chain, and he was granting it, fingers going on the keyboard, right up until I said the seminar and the term. Then the fingers stopped.
"Spring," he said.
"Spring."
He typed again, slower. The screen faced away from me, which is standard, and he read it the way people read a thing they already know, which is not. Then he said, "One student from that roll is no longer with the college. Transferred."
"Okay," I said. "Transferred where?"
"The record doesn't say."
Now. I have spent eleven years in and around university registries, and I'll tell you what a transfer is: a transfer is paperwork squared.
A transfer has a receiving institution, a transcript request, a release form, a forwarding address, a date.
Short of graduating or dying, transferring is the best-documented thing a student can do.
There is no such animal as a transfer record that doesn't say where.
I said most of that, in the friendly version, with the smile that got me through four years of hearings and hiring committees. Ballard took his glasses off, which is what men his age do instead of squaring their shoulders.
"The file is closed, Dr. Mercer."
"Closed. Is that a registry status? I'd love to see the field where it says closed."
"The file," he said, "is closed."
"Can I at least get the reading list? For the students who are still with us?"
He printed me the reading list. His hands wanted to be doing an ordinary thing and I recognized the want professionally, the way one insomniac clocks another across a breakfast table.
I thanked him, took my printout, and it was only outside on the steps, under the brass plate, that the two wrong things I'd been carrying finished introducing themselves to each other.
Wrong thing one: he said transferred before the screen finished loading. I'd watched the little bar crawl in the reflection of his glasses. The answer was in the man before it was in the machine.
Wrong thing two, which is worse, and which took me half the walk back to Letters to let myself see: I never gave him a name.
I asked for a roll. A whole seminar's worth of students, eight or nine of them, and he went straight past all of them to the one that mattered and volunteered him to me, unasked, the way you hand a customs officer the exact item you've decided he came for.
Item twenty-eight: last spring's seminar roll has a hole in it shaped like one missing student, and the man who keeps the record knows the shape by heart.
* * *
Tuesday. Seminar, and the break at half past ten, which is a fixed institution now: Toby's pastry service, a cardboard tray, a thermos of coffee better than anything the college sells, everybody's orders memorized including mine, which I never told him.
I had promised myself in the cloister that I wouldn't ask the cohort.
I kept that promise the way I keep most promises to myself, which is to say I located the loophole and drove through it at speed.
I didn't ask about Micah Vane. I complained, mildly, croissant in hand, about the registrar, which is a faculty pastime as old as registrars.
"They can't reconstruct last spring's roll for me. Somebody transferred, apparently, and the whole file's closed, so if any of you remember what the seminar actually covered before I got here, I'd take a syllabus, a rumor of a syllabus, anything."
Deniable. Administrative. I'd workshopped the wording on the walk in.
The students shut down anyway. I'd seen it happen once before, over the scratched name, and it's not dramatic, that's what makes it awful; it's a temperature.
Hannah's pen stopped moving. Wes set down his coffee and started building a joke, I could see the scaffolding going up behind his eyes, something about accreditation ghosts, boards over a well.
Kit studied the carved duck in the tabletop like it had new information for him.
Priya looked at me, just me, level, the way opposing counsel looks at you when you've asked the witness a question everyone in the courtroom understands except, allegedly, you.
And June, nineteen, jam on her wrist, said, "You mean Micah."
Nobody moved.
"Micah Vane," she said, helpfully, to me, because I was new and the new man deserves facts.
"Second year. He didn't transfer, though.
His bike was outside Whitlock all summer, chained to the rack, I walked past it every day, and it only went right before term.
" She looked around the table. "Why is everyone looking at their food? "
Four looks. I counted them, because counting is the nearest I get to composure.
Wes looked at her over his glasses, the joke abandoned half-built.
Hannah looked at her fast and scared, a look with a grab in it, the kind you'd use on someone's sleeve at a road edge.
Priya's look was longest, and it wasn't angry; that's the part I keep going back over; it was procedural, a look that said this has a protocol and you are off it.
And Kit, and Kit's was the one that got me out of all four, because Kit didn't look at June at all.
Kit looked at the door.
Then everyone in the seminar resumed at the wrong speed, the way a radio comes back mid-song.
Toby refilled a coffee nobody had asked him to refill.
Wes finished a different joke than the one he'd been building, and it landed fine, and everyone laughed a beat long.
June didn't say anything else for the rest of the seminar.
I want that on the record, because I don't know a force on this campus that had managed it before: fifty minutes of Boethius, and June Alvarez, silent, drawing the same small square over and over on the corner of her notes.
After, in the corridor, I made it three steps toward her, and Priya was already there with her arm through June's, walking her off at conversational speed, talking loudly about a deadline that I happen to know does not exist.
Item twenty-nine: the name is Micah Vane.
It cost June four looks and a silent hour, and it cost me nothing, because I built the question so it couldn't be traced to what it was.
Deniable to whom, exactly? Everyone in that room knew what I was doing.
The only person the deniability protected was me.
Item thirty: the bike. A man who transfers takes his bike, or sells it, or ships it. A bike chained outside Whitlock from June to August belongs to a man who expected to be back within the hour.
Item thirty-one: Kit looked at the door. What did he think the door was going to do?
I sat with item twenty-nine a long time that night.
There's a woman in a green scarf somewhere on this campus who was singled out for whispering, and now there's a nineteen-year-old who got looked at for a bicycle, and both times the common factor was me, standing nearby, taking notes.
The notebook is supposed to be where I put things so they stop costing anybody anything. I'm no longer sure it works like that.
* * *
Wednesday I did theory maintenance, because a theory you don't service will run on you long after it should have thrown a rod.
The drug market had been sick since Leah Brandt.
Vaguer isn't high; I'd established that.
But sick isn't dead, and I'd kept it limping along on the grounds that a campus drug scandal is exactly the kind of thing a college like this would bury with full honors: closed file, scrubbed registry, a word like transferred doing the work of a tarp.
The bike even fit, if you wanted it to. People who go into crisis abandon bikes.
People who get quietly removed abandon bikes.
So the theory lived, on a ventilator, through Wednesday.
Here is what I did Wednesday night instead of sleeping, because I don't sleep the way I used to; I get up at two and stand at the dark window and run my checks like a night nurse.
Fog: level on the lawns, present, correct.
The closed building: dark, all floors, no moving light, thirteen nights running now.
Service lane: empty. It's not a hobby. A hobby is something you could stop.
And at fourteen minutes past two, technically Thursday, the checks failed, because the dark at the bottom of the building had the wrong depth in it.
The service door. It's recessed, down two steps, a wired-glass panel at head height, and it has been padlocked every night since the night security walked me through the building; I know because checking the hasp is on my circuit, the way the fog is on my circuit.
I stood at my window looking at a rectangle of dark that was deeper than the dark around it, and then I put a coat on over what I sleep in and went down my three flights and across the lane, and I want it noted that at no point did any part of me argue.
That's new. That's worth an item of its own someday, what this place has done to my sense of proportion.
The padlock hung open on the staple, hooked by its own curve, like a coat on one finger. The door stood off the latch by an inch.