One young white guy in a FUBU sweatshirt held my glance so long that I felt like I had to say something. “Hi.”
He replied, “’Sup,” and kept looking.
I took this as an invitation to cross the line past what was likely appropriate, considering my probationary status as an employee and my perhaps shaky status as a husband now that my wife was balking on making the few-hundred-mile move to Southern California. I said to him, “Lola’s not taking her smoke break, huh?”
“Who?”
“Lola Diaz?”
“She a nurse or something?”
“A patient.”
The dude shook his head. “Ain’t no beaners in this dorm.”
I winced, either at the word “beaner” or at the usually repressed notion that something about me in my white skin and discount department store clothes suggested that I was an okay guy to say “beaner” around. I thought about making a comment about his comment and taking this conversation to the next level. I stopped myself when I realized that this dude was a patient at a mental hospital. “A patient,” I told myself. “In a mental hospital.” Besides that, he was a white guy in a FUBU shirt. I let it all slide, cut through the dual diagnosis dorm, and headed for the Williams Building.
Originally, the Williams Building had been built on the bottom of a hill. Small white Doric columns framed the entranceway. The building stretched three stories above the classical entranceway, its ancient brick bleached by the California sun, reinforced by rusty sand filling in porous gaps, and worn smooth by Pacific winds. The original building carried an addition the way a horseshoe crab carries its young. The addition stretched halfway up the hill, supported by newer brick, flanked by newer windows, topped by a black shingle roof that was sloped slightly steeper than the original. Sunlight bounced off the ghost of a long-forgotten contractor who surely must have put an arm around a cost-conscious university president saying, “We can save you thousands of dollars this way and who’s gonna know the difference? You and me. That’s it.” And perhaps a younger ghost of that older university president was looking at the finished addition, thinking, No. Everyone will notice. All in all, the building didn’t look too bad. Another twenty years of sun and dirt and wind might even the score.
The toughest thing about the addition came from the building’s inside layout. The Williams Building was four stories high but it had eight different levels. Nine, if you counted the basement. The first floor of the original building was roughly six feet lower than the first floor of the newer building. All of the ceilings were about twelve feet high. The hallways from the newer building didn’t exactly match up with the older hallways. Shrinking faculty offices, wide open halls for lectures, subdivided rooms for graduate assistants, and reroutes through the old classrooms that had been cut into newer, smaller ones added to the overall maze of the guts of the Williams Building. Six-foot stairways would surprise me. Halls would lead to dark recesses yet to be remodeled for the building’s new job in the psych hospital. Simple errands during my first week caused me to pause and reflect on who might own a complete blueprint of this building and whether he’d sell me that blueprint. At times, I dreamed of drawing the Williams Building treasure map and placing a giant red X on my office. I toyed with the idea of bringing string to work, letting it unravel from the front door to my office. Breadcrumbs seemed too unreliable. My office was on the third and a half floor.
I wound my way through the Williams labyrinth, counting my steps. Twelve paces to the right to reach the stairway, up four levels of stairs, then to the left. I fumed about that cracked inner tube of a kid calling the second girl I’d ever loved a “beaner.” I cut through the interns’ lounge and counted seven more steps to the left. I tried to remind myself that I have to give people more leeway in a psych hospital. That argument didn’t work. I still fumed. I successfully reminded myself that those last seven steps to the left were always a mistake and turned around, repairing those seven mistaken steps and adding an additional thirteen to them before reaching another half-stairway that led me to the familiar right turn into what on Sundays was apparently a dark hallway. For whatever reason, this reminded me of Nietzsche again. The dog, not the philosopher. I closed my eyes and counted my last steps thinking about the now-departed pup. At the count of eight, I opened my eyes again, turned to the right, and opened my office door.
The Professor sat there. He faced my desk, back to the door. He did not turn to look at me as I entered the office. I walked around my desk, sat in my chair, and faced him. “Professor,” I said, and smiled.
This is a problem of mine: I smile when I don’t know which emotion to express. I’ve been doing it at least since I was a little kid. I distinctly remember smiling when my mother told me that my grandmother—her mother—had died. Not because I wasn’t sad. I was very sad; I’d just lost my favorite grandparent. I was old enough at the time to know what death meant. I just wasn’t old enough to know what to do with that sadness and my mom usually cheered up if I gave her a smile. So I gave her an absolutely inappropriate smile.
Thirty years of life hadn’t taught me much about what to do with my sadness. The best I could come up with on this Sunday was a trip to a psych hospital and a smile for The Professor, who, to the best of my knowledge, was a patient with the potential to become dangerous.
The Professor stood and offered his hand. I stood and shook it. We both sat again. The Professor didn’t say a word. He regarded me. I took in his bow tie, his blue blazer, his maroon sweater vest, his crisp white shirt. Crumbs clung to the fuzz of his sweater vest, gathered along the little crest formed by his stomach when he sat. My eyes lingered on the crumbs. Toast? A Reuben for lunch, perhaps?
Time passed. That stupid smile stayed glued to my face.
Finally, The Professor said, “You must be the new grant writer.”
“I must be,” I said.
“Your timing couldn’t be better,” he said.
I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. He seemed somehow smaller in that chair, facing my desk. In front of the lecture hall on that first day, The Professor had beamed with a well-honed stage presence. Or classroom presence. He’d had that style, that cool of a shy person in his element. Sitting in the chair across from me, he lost that style. His body language seemed to tell a familiar story about being on the wrong side of a desk in all the places we find ourselves in the smaller chair: when we’re sent to the principal’s office, when we buy insurance, when we file a report at the police station, when we petition a professor for a higher grade or a boss for a raise. A transference from all those small moments of supplication weighed down The Professor’s shoulders.
I didn’t like my position—that of a principal, an insurance salesman, a cop, an authority of any kind. I wanted to put him at ease but I didn’t know how. I watched him and kept waiting. When the pause stretched into the recesses of uncomfortable, I said, “How can I help?”
The Professor stroked the edge of his bow tie. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you about the scandal.”
I shrugged. I hoped it was a vague enough gesture to get the three-syllable-crazy story from him. Apparently, The Professor read my shrug differently.
“Needless to say, Winfield University has seen better days. What this university needs is something dazzling, an academic statement that will reestablish us among the elite private universities on the West Coast. I propose to make this statement.”
I picked up a pencil from the cup on my desk. I rolled the pencil between the pads of my thumbs and forefingers on both hands. The Professor watched the pencil’s slow roll. His eyes met mine, looking for an answer. I said, “Please, go on?”
Perhaps it was a little cruel for me to humor The Professor in this way. Perhaps I should’ve