Chapter 3
Chapter Three
She took the side stairs on the way out, specifically to avoid the floor. The floor caught her anyway. Hollis's door stood open, and his chair swiveled toward the corridor at precisely the wrong instant, and there was no version of walking past that wouldn't have been a decision.
"Elena. Do you have a second."
It wasn't a question, and she knew it wasn't, and she stepped into the doorway because the alternative was to make a point of not stepping into it.
There was a folder squared up on the desk in front of him, and he didn't open it, which was somehow worse than if he had.
He talked around it in the passive voice he used for anything that might cost him something to own.
The budget line was under a certain amount of pressure this year.
The enrollment numbers weren't quite where the dean would like to see them.
Difficult conversations of this general sort were being had at every institution in the country, really, in the current climate.
And then, low down in all of it, almost apologetically, the word contract.
"Renewal isn't quite guaranteed in the usual way this cycle," he said.
"For anyone. I want to be clear that it isn't only you.
But I'm telling you early, because I respect you, and because a lot of people sitting in this chair wouldn't bother to give you the runway.
They'd just let the letter arrive in the spring. "
"How long do I have?" Elena said. "Roughly. So I can plan."
"The committee meets in the spring. March, probably April.
I'll know more after the enrollment figures firm up in January.
" He turned his coffee mug a quarter turn without picking it up.
"I'm not putting a clock on you tonight.
I'm telling you there's a clock. That's the difference, and it's the only kindness I've got to offer, so I'm offering it. "
"Is there something I can actually do?" Elena said. "A number I can hit. A course nobody wants that I could pick up. Tell me what the lever is and I'll pull it."
"Publish would help." He said it gently, and he didn't quite look at her when he said it.
"Visibility, honestly, more than volume.
Something with the department's name attached to it that isn't —" He stopped himself before he got to the noun.
"It's not fair. I know it isn't. It's the one lever I've got and it happens to be the one that isn't fair, and I'm sorry, Elena. I am."
"I appreciate the candor," she said, and left it there.
There were other things she could have said.
She'd said several of them once, years ago, in a room not unlike this one, to a man not unlike this one, and she knew now what each of them had cost and how little any of them had bought.
So she let the silence do the rest of it, and Hollis took the silence gratefully, and nodded, and she turned to go.
She had one hand on the doorframe when Arturo Menéndez filled the rest of the frame from the corridor side — good coat, good haircut, the unhurried warmth of a man who flew business class on a grant that had someone else's name on the cover.
"Elena. I thought that was you." He said it as though he were handing her something. "God, how long has it been now? You look well. You look rested."
"Arturo," she said. "What brings you into the building?"
"The Pre-Columbian panel — I'm chairing it, they roped me in, you know how these things go.
One says yes once and then it's yours in perpetuity.
" He waved a hand at the burden of his own importance, and the gesture took in the whole dim corridor as it went, the dead half of every light fixture, the radiator smell, the water-stained ceiling tile by the stairwell, and set the entire shabby floor at a quiet disadvantage against wherever it was he spent his days now.
"You should sit in on it, honestly. Some of the old crowd will be there.
Beltrán's flying in for it, Okafor. People still ask after you, you know.
Such a mind, they say. Such a shame. Their words, I want to be clear, not mine. I defend you when it comes up."
"From what, exactly?"
"From the story." He said it kindly, patient with her for having missed something obvious.
"You can't unwrite a story like that one, Elena, that's the thing people never understand.
There's no retraction big enough. All you can do is crowd it out — bury it under newer ones until it's no longer the first thing that comes up.
That's the whole game, in the end. It always was.
We just used to have the good manners to pretend it was about the work.
" He tilted his head. "Do you know what Baird's presenting tomorrow?
The keeper traditions. Secret custodians, hidden libraries, noble guardians sworn to keep the dangerous knowledge safe from the unworthy.
Every graduate student goes through the phase. "
"I went through the phase," Elena said.
"Of course you did. We all did." He chuckled at the folly of the young, his own younger self apparently included in the amnesty.
"Complete hoax, naturally. No provenance for any of it worth the name, half of it invented outright by some Victorian forger with a publisher to feed and a mortgage on a house in Kent. "
"Some of it," Elena said. "Not all of it.
There are a few of the source texts that predate the forger by a good century, and nobody's ever satisfactorily accounted for those.
I'm not saying there's anything in it. I'm saying the confident dismissal is doing about as much work as the confident belief, and neither one has actually read the primary material lately. "
"See, that." He pointed at her, delighted, as though she'd performed a small trick for him.
"That's the mind talking. That's exactly what they miss about you.
But it fills a room, that's the thing. People do love a secret that flatters them for very nearly being clever enough to know it.
" He looked at her then, and under the warmth something cooler and more exact took its reading, the way it always had, since they were students standing over the same tray of sherds.
"Publish again, Elena. Even something small.
A note. A book review. A single honest paragraph with your name spelled correctly underneath it.
People forget — you'd genuinely be amazed how quickly they forget, it's almost insulting how quickly — but only if you give them a newer line to remember instead.
Right now the only line anyone has is the old one, and every day you stay quiet you're letting them keep it.
Don't let the fake be the last thing anyone ever says about you.
You're better than your worst footnote."
"I'll think about it," Elena said, which was what she said to everything now. It came out smooth and entirely empty, and he heard exactly how empty it was, and he was gracious enough, or indifferent enough, to let her have it.
"Do," he said. "I'd genuinely like to be wrong about you. For old times' sake, if nothing else."
"Goodnight, Arturo."
She took the side stairs after all, even though he'd already seen her.