9. Thomas
Thomas
Eleven seconds. I counted them while they were happening, some back-office clerk in me clicking a stopwatch while the rest of the building burned, and I want to know who installed that clerk, because the first time my life came apart this way I didn't count anything.
I just fell. Apparently I've developed procedures since then, and the procedure for kissing your boss in a rainstorm at ten to two in the morning is: count, retreat, document.
So here's the documentation, written Saturday at noon with coffee going cold, because I slept till eleven for the first time since August and woke up already arguing with myself.
Item thirty-two: eleven seconds. Counted. Broken off by both of us at the same instant, which I have decided to find comforting, because the alternative reading is that we're synchronized, and synchronized is worse.
Item thirty-three: he laughed. Before. Once, one syllable, out of him like something escaping, and I've been on this campus four weeks and I would testify under oath that the man has never laughed in the working memory of anyone here.
Filed under events, not sounds. The rain actually seemed embarrassed.
Item thirty-four: the lamps on the east walk browned out in a line that ended where he was standing, and the fog ran all night toward the building he was touching, and his nose was bleeding, and he said "weather," and I kissed him anyway.
Item thirty-five: amend the new page's heading. Things that are actually happening, including, apparently, to me.
The rain had dried. My mouth had not got the message. Every time I touched it, the eleven seconds came back whole: his hand at my jaw, the sound I made at four, the step back at eleven. I wanted a twelfth second. That was the unfiled item.
I looked at the four of them together for a while.
Separately, each one was survivable. Together they said that the strangest thing on a campus where I have watched a wand put out fire is the Headmaster of the college, and that my mouth has opinions about him that it acted on without calling upstairs.
Fine. Protocol, then. I've run cold-turkey protocols before: after Richard, I didn't so much as have coffee alone with anyone above me on an org chart for four years.
The Ashgrave version drafted itself in twenty minutes: no more night walks past the Lodge side of the quad; meals shifted early, out of high-table hours; the long way to Letters, which adds four minutes and subtracts one corridor where a man in a gray coat crosses at eleven and one; all agenda items requiring the Headmaster to be routed through email, cc the department, tone of a man laminating something.
Two people can dodge each other for years on a campus this size.
Whole marriages have been avoided this way.
I gave the protocol a green light Saturday afternoon and it ran beautifully for two days.
Monday at 9:40 a.m., the protocol died in my pigeonhole.
College letterhead. Three sentences. As part of a review of onboarding procedure, the appointment of new senior members will be subject to termly supervision meetings, conducted personally by the Headmaster.
Dr. T. Mercer's review will convene Tuesdays at four o'clock in the Headmaster's office, beginning tomorrow. The schedule is not elective.
I turned the memo over, then checked the other pigeonholes, because that's who I am now: no cream envelopes this time, no matching memos.
There are six other new hires this year, including a chemist and an economist, and I found out by Wednesday, asking around with the special casualness I'm getting so much practice at, that none of them has a Tuesday anything.
Item thirty-six: the same institution that edits its own ledgers has assigned the Headmaster and me to a room together. Weekly. By name. The memo says procedure, and I have read enough of this college's paper now to know that the word procedure is where it keeps its fingerprints.
* * *
His office manages to be the warmest room I've been cold in. Long windows, a fire laid but not lit, a desk you could land aircraft on, and every object on it squared to every other object, which after four weeks I could have predicted, and did, in the notebook, in advance, for points.
He was standing when I came in, and neither of us tried to shake hands, which was its own conversation.
"Dr. Mercer."
"Headmaster."
"Sit, please."
I sat. He sat. Between us on the desk: my file, a printed agenda, and a carafe of water with two glasses, and I looked at the two glasses and thought about the last object that had stood between us, which was a decanter, and did not say so, and he watched me not say it with the expression of a man reading a telegram through the envelope.
"You will want to know the terms of this review," he said. "There are four items."
"Of course there are."
"Teaching. Research trajectory. Committee load. Integration."
"Integration," I said. "Into what?"
A pause you could have parked in. "The life of the college."
"Right," I said. "And this meets weekly. The chemist doesn't have one of these, by the way. I checked. The economist doesn't either. Just me. Which makes it less a procedure and more a standing surveillance order."
"The review is not my invention." He aligned the agenda with the edge of the blotter, one millimeter of correction, and I watched the hands do it, because some protocols fail quietly and mine had.
"Our visiting fellow takes a scholarly interest in the college's procedures.
She found our onboarding insufficiently attended.
The recommendation named no one, and the Provost's office selected the pilot case, and the pilot case is the newest senior appointment, and that is you. "
All true, I'd bet the notebook. All shaped.
The little gray woman who eats nothing and reads the hall ordered my boss into a room with me, every week, on paper, for reasons of procedure, four days after — I looked at his face for the rest of that sentence and his face declined to finish it, and so did I.
"Fine," I said. "Item one. Teaching."
And here's the thing I have to write down, because the notebook is where I stop lying: the hour worked.
Not the review, the review was boilerplate; I mean the two of us, in a room, with a task.
He'd read my seminar plan the way he reads everything, which is to say more closely than I had, and he flagged the week I'd overloaded, the exact week, the one I'd been privately dreading, and slid one finger onto the page like a man indicating a structural fault on a drawing.
"Your fifth week asks them for two impossible things at once. "
"It asks them for effort."
"It asks them for Boethius and their first essay in the same seven days. One of the two will be done badly. You know which."
I did know which. I'd known in August. "You're supervising my syllabus now?"
"I am supervising your review." Beat. "The syllabus came up."
"Your seminar interest runs deep for a man with a college to run."
"Your seminar runs loud," he said. "I hear of it."
"You hear of it."
"The college is small," he said, "and the walls are thin," and there it was, the register we've apparently agreed on without negotiating it: every sentence with two floors, and both of us taking the stairs between them, and neither of us ever, ever naming the building.
It isn't fencing anymore. Fencing has rules and a winner.
This was more like two men carrying a pane of glass across a courtyard, very carefully, in conversation about the weather, both pretending their hands aren't full.
I dropped my end exactly once. Somewhere around the committee-load item I started a sentence I had no exit for: "For the record, about the other night, I don't—" and heard where it was going, which was nowhere with a floor, and landed instead on "—want the fifth week moved after all.
" A full second. Then: "No," he said, agreeing to the version I'd swapped in, in the tone of a man initialing an amended minute, and his eyes had read the original draft, and neither of us circulated it.
Forty minutes in, reaching across for the carafe, he stopped, and said, not looking up, "Friday night—"
Two words. My heart did a thing I resented in real time.
"—the storm," he said, "reached your rooms? No damage?"
"No damage," I said, which was the biggest lie I've told on this campus, where I once told a security officer I was sure I'd seen nothing.
"Good," he said, and poured the water, and that was the closest either of us went to the wall, forty minutes with the pane of glass and nobody dropped it, and at five o'clock exactly he stood, and I stood, and he said, "Tuesday next," and I said, "It's not elective," and left, and in the corridor I had to stand for a second with my back against the cold stone like a teenager, taking inventory of my own pulse, disgusted with the entire man I have turned out to be.
Item thirty-seven: he was going to say something else after "Friday night." I watched him reroute it mid-span like a bridge crew. I have now spent one hour alone with him post-error and can report that the error is stable, structural, and in no danger of being repaired.
* * *
Wednesday and Thursday nights I did honest work, by which I mean I finally built the thing I'd been circling for a month.
Here's what I had. Leah Brandt went sideways on a Thursday; her email said so; her four missing minutes have an anniversary every week that she doesn't know she's observing.
The whisper-fight was about who's sitting this term, present continuous, a schedule in progress.
The gatehouse ledger lost a Thursday page.
The light in the closed building moved on a Thursday.
The wand was a Thursday, 2:14 a.m. My kiss — not relevant, Mercer — was a Friday, technically Saturday.
One weekday, recurring. That's not a pattern yet; that's a suspicion with a calendar. So I went and got the only archive nobody guards: attendance.