9. Thomas #2
Departmental attendance registers live in the Letters office in a filing drawer that predates suspicion, and nobody has ever razored them, because nobody has ever thought of them as records of anything except who was hungover.
I pulled every register I could reach going back two academic years, and I sat up both nights with graph paper and a ruler, weeks across the top, and I marked every Friday where a student who'd been solid all term went suddenly absent, or present-but-blank, the notation tutors use without thinking: present, no contribution. Quiet Fridays. Vague Fridays.
They cluster. They cluster the day after certain Thursdays, and the Thursdays repeat, and the repetition has a wavelength.
Two years ago the quiet Fridays came every five weeks, regular as rent.
Last autumn, call it four and a half. By last spring the gap was four, then not quite four.
My own four weeks of term say the current figure is closer to three.
I sat looking at the graph paper at two in the morning with the ruler still in my hand, and I want to record the exact shape of the cold that went through me, because it wasn't the pattern.
Patterns I can live with; a pattern is just a schedule wearing a mask.
It was the trend. Whatever this college does to its students on Thursdays, it used to do every five weeks, and now it does it every three, and the line through those points isn't flat, and lines that aren't flat are going somewhere.
Grid started. Things that are actually happening, entry seven: the interval is real, it is measurable, and it is shortening.
One more thing, and I'm putting it down flat so I can't soften it later: the spring register for the graduate seminar, the one that would have Micah Vane's Thursdays in it, isn't in the drawer.
Every other term of the last decade, present and correct and smelling of pencil.
That one term: a paper sleeve, empty, with the term's dates on the tab in a tidy hand.
The editor got there first. The editor is thorough. The editor did not think of the other registers, which means the editor is human, which is the most useful thing I've learned all term.
* * *
Thursday, Elena fed me at her flat, because she has a standing theory that nobody with my haircut cooks vegetables, and over her table I performed a small anthology of deflections while she watched me the way a woman watches a kettle she has decided not to rescue.
"You've told me four lies since the salad," she said, eventually. "I counted. I always count."
"Which four?"
"'I'm sleeping fine.' 'The review's just admin.' 'I barely see him outside it.'" She refilled my glass. "And 'this is great,' about my chicken, which was dry, so that one I forgive."
"The chicken was—"
"Thomas." She never uses my first name. It sat me back in the chair.
"You came off that high table nine days ago looking like a man doing long division, and now you look like a man who got an answer he can't show his work for.
I'm not asking what happened. I'm asking why you handle that man like a hot dish. "
And I don't know if it was the wine, or the graph paper still printed on the inside of my eyelids, or just the fact of one person in this postcode counting things the way I count things, but I put my fork down and told her the whole account, straight through, no jokes, first time out loud in four years.
"His name was Richard. He was my department chair.
He was married, which I knew, and it was over between them, which I believed, because he said it with his hand on my jaw and you can't notarize anything at that range.
Two years. I thought I was a secret because I was precious.
" I turned the glass a quarter turn on her tablecloth, and noticed myself doing it, and put my hand in my lap. "I was a secret because I was deniable.
"It came apart over money, in the end. Not love, money.
There were hotel bills, conference weekends, two years of them, and it turned out they'd been billed to a research grant I was named on.
I didn't book those rooms and I never saw the invoices, but my name was on the grant, so my name was on the audit, and the audit is how his college and his wife found out on the same day.
"There was a hearing. He didn't look at me.
He read a statement his lawyers wrote, and he was wearing a tie I'd given him, which I choose to believe he didn't notice that morning, because the other reading is worse.
And his counsel used the word predatory, at the hearing, into the microphone.
" I heard Elena stop chewing. "About me.
The twenty-eight-year-old untenured nobody had preyed on the fifty-five-year-old chair with the budget and the keys and the wife.
That was the theory, and here's the thing about a hearing: it doesn't have to convict you.
It just has to publish the word. He kept his chair.
I got a finding of no formal misconduct and a professional obituary, and nobody ever wrote the word blacklist anywhere, and eleven colleges passed on me in eighteen months, and Ashgrave was the twelfth.
"So no. I don't do bosses." I got the glass again, because my hands wanted work. "Especially ones I actually like."
The radiator ticked. Elena sat very still, and then she reached over and moved the wine bottle out of my reach, which is her love language, and said:
"'Like.' Present tense."
"Grammar's a trap."
"Mm," she said. "So's the passive voice, and you just told me a four-minute story where everything got done to you, right up until the last sentence, which is the first one you built yourself.
" She stood and started stacking plates, unhurried.
"'I don't do bosses.' Fine. It's a good wall, and you paid for it, and I'd have built it twice as high.
" At the kitchen door she stopped, plates balanced, and looked back at me with no punchline anywhere in her face.
"But you should know it's the first wall of yours I've watched you check for a door. "
I walked home the long way, past the east range, because the long way is protocol and the protocol is a joke I keep telling with a straight face.
The seam of mortar between the second and third buttresses looked like every other seam of mortar, and I stood there anyway with my collar up, and then I went up my three flights and opened the notebook.
Item thirty-eight: the intervals are shortening. Whatever this college does on Thursdays, it's hungrier than it was two years ago, and nobody who keeps the real records knows I have the fake ones.
Item thirty-nine: Tuesday, four o'clock. I already know which shirt I'll wear. That's the whole problem, itemized.