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Life on the Edge

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Life on the Edge
Simon Thinks

Pat Dixon

    Once, long ago, Simon noted that he
    Was prone to begin “Once,” “Long ago,” and “It used to be”;
    But self-insights are rare, and more often than not
    They were, like this one, forgot.
     —Joel Hazard

1


    Once upon a time, Winston Edmund Whitehead, professor of chemistry at a tiny military academy in southern Connecticut, was driving his nine-year-old Honda to work. It was Tuesday, payday. Before leaving his apartment, he had consulted his “stuff to do” list and felt that he should pick up cash—a couple hundred bucks—because a long Thanksgiving weekend was fast, yet once more, approaching. On Thanksgiving itself, as had been his custom for the past seventeen years, he would be taking four “orphans”—college students who were staying on campus over this holiday—to a local restaurant for dinner. He strongly preferred to pay the check and tip with cash.
    As he drove, Whitehead wondered vaguely and without urgency which cash machine would be easiest to aim for. The whole route from home to office was just under fifteen miles via four small bedroom villages, and the third and fourth of these had small branches of his bank on their main streets.
    In irritation at a shrill commercial urging him to invest in high-yield bonds, Whitehead shut off his car radio and made brief, birdlike glances at his collection of audiocassettes. Today he chose the one with highlights from Verdi’s opera Nabucco. With the familiar opening notes of “Va, pensiero, sull’ ali dorate,” his spirits soared, and he no longer minded the bumper-to-bumper traffic that slowly snaked along the maze of old narrow blacktop roads.
    This morning while shaving he finally had noticed his massive belly with displeasure and had willfully begun a diet. His doctor had told him four years ago that his weight was creeping up, and today, moved by vanity, he was heeding that warning—one bran muffin, a small glass of apple juice, and one cup of instant coffee must suffice till noon! Now, as if in vengeance, his rebelling stomach began to compete with Verdi’s chorus of Hebrew captives, and Professor Whitehead, to stifle it, pulled a large bottle of antacid tablets from his glove compartment and took six of them. Extra calcium—good for me, he thought and began humming along with the noble melody which had been played at Verdi’s funeral by, he believed, Toscanni—and at Toscanni’s funeral by—by—somebody else. Brief visual images of a TV documentary on Verdi flashed through his mind as he drove.
    Halfway to work, small drops of rain began to appear on his windshield. Within two hundred yards it began to pour, and Whitehead automatically turned his wipers on at their highest setting. The headlights of oncoming traffic suggested that it would be somewhat darker ahead. He turned on his own headlights and whispered a new buzz word he’d recently learned—“Proactive”—and smiled wryly.
    He unconsciously began to visualize his route to the first bank—it was three blocks beyond his normal turn-off to the fourth village. In his mind’s eye he replayed about a dozen scenes from past experience—driving south and being unlucky nine times out of ten, driving north and never finding parking, trying side streets with little hope and less luck. He saw himself trying to regain the westward road to the fourth village during morning rush traffic, being variously trapped behind timid drivers or in front of impatient hornblowers. Images of alternate side roads that paralleled or rejoined his usual route came into his mind in rapid succession—images lasting fractions of a second—all of them unpleasant and some of them quite distressing. Through all this, however, he continued to hum or sing along with his cassette.
    The autumn rain was much heavier now, and he increased the speed of his wipers and decreased the speed of his vehicle. The glare of oncoming headlights made him squint slightly.
    Driving into the second village, Professor Whitehead jammed on his brakes and sounded his station wagon’s ineffectual little horn—a young man in a pickup truck had passed him on the right and then cut in front of him to make a left turn into a supermarket.
    “Schmuck!” yelled Whitehead, venting his sudden anger. Guiseppe’s getting competition for my attention today, he thought. As he proceeded somewhat more cautiously, he continued to hum and sing, and dozens of additional images of village roads and streets flashed through his mind—some of them replays of the first series, some of them views of the routes and parking areas near the bank in the fourth village, some of them evening scenes in which he was driving homeward looking for parking near the bank after work.
    Images of the restaurant he’d made reservations at came into his mind as he approached a side road that led to it. Professor Whitehead knew only one of the “orphans” slightly from a class last year, but he would be meeting the other three for the first time tomorrow afternoon to spell out pick-up times and his price range for the dinner. Last year had been especially pleasant, he recalled—the dean’s assistant had given him one total stranger and three students he’d given low grades to, and by the end of the evening these four who had nothing to gain from him were fully agreed—at least for the moment—that his stricter grading was the kind of “reality check” that students needed. Indeed, two of them, who’d failed his course the first time around and who’d figuratively cried in his office when they’d seen their grades, had been able to laugh at their younger selves by the end of the evening.
    At a traffic light, Professor Whitehead began playing the other side of his Verdi cassette. Who else, he wondered, who else volunteers to take these kids out to dinner on a holiday? Only twice had students been staying on campus over Christmas, and he’d been there each time with an offer of dinner and, if they wanted, an evening church service, both of which had been eagerly accepted. He caught himself: Don’t polish your own halo, asshole! He smiled and recalled that a dear dead friend had told him that on several occasions. Elaine, he thought, with bittersweet feelings. He could almost smell her, and his finger tips and lips experienced a tactile memory of her body and face. He sniffed in a deep breath, shrugged, and regripped his steering wheel to shake away her ghost.
    As his Honda approached the fork that led to the west, Professor Whitehead hummed and thought about the quiz he would be giving in his first class. For the third time a series of visual images pertaining to the two banks and parking and routes to and from them ran through his mind—now, though, for the first time, he became conscious of these images.
    Huh—like a kind of maze! he thought. Solving—trying to solve—options being shown—son of a gun! Like tracing paths though a maze. He tried to visualize the routes willfully but could not. Focus on the damned road! Watch the road! he told himself as his right wheels grazed a curb.
    He approached the fork where a decision had to be made—bank one or bank two—and smiled at the lack of real urgency. He weighed the factors of traffic light color and numbers of cars in each lane and, with fifty feet to go, stayed in the right lane, which branched to the west. The red light and five cars waiting in the left lane had lost out to the green turn arrow and three cars making the right turn. The bank of village number three was effectively ruled out for now—unless—unless he were to backtrack stupidly and try approaching it from the south. Whitehead smiled at that notion and sped up as the lighter traffic ahead of him did likewise.
    Although he usually took one of his four short cuts through the final village rather than drive up its main street, he consciously decided to drive by his bank to see whether easy parking was available now. Scores of visual images of this route appeared fleetingly to him, and Whitehead was aware of “previewing” at least seven parking options, including two parking lots that could only be approached awkwardly from one-way streets. Like solving some kind of damned maze! Like playing with a chess problem, he thought again, smiling to himself.
    The rain had stopped, and, prompted by the noise of rubber on dry glass, his right hand, almost as a reflex, turned the wipers off. The morning sun shined brightly on the soaked pavement ahead of his station wagon, causing him to squint.
    From his distant past, Professor Whitehead recalled images of being on a warm beach with Marlene, his childhood sweetheart and then his wife. They’d been married for three years, and he was reading Look magazine while she sunbathed. He’d shut one eye and noticed that the bright white page had changed to pale pink. When he’d opened his eye, the page became white again. He experimented, shutting the other eye, and found that the page became pale blue. For over a minute he’d played with this novelty and then had shared his discovery with Marlene. Thirty-five years ago, babe, he thought.
    Marlene had been irritated to hear his findings and had scoffed and said that her eyes and brain didn’t work like this and probably no one else’s did either. Until today, he’d put the memory from him. He began now to wonder about his newest “discovery.” Did he usually make decisions this way? Were there other things that led to images? Did others’ minds also work this way?
    Ever since his very first exposure to Freudian psychology during high school, he had always been skeptical about descriptions of how “the unconscious” worked. What he had experienced today seemed different from what he’d read about in his two college psychology courses or in the several pop-psych books and articles he’d read later. Even the two weightier books by professional therapists that he’d struggled through didn’t have any passages he could recall that covered the images he’d just seen.
    Professor Whitehead wondered why he’d never noticed them before. Was his mind doing this for the first time? Was today different somehow? He resolved to make a point of looking into the matter during the next week, both by looking through psychology texts and by asking others—no matter how embarrassing it might be to appear “weird” to them. After all, they weren’t Marlene, and he was no longer a pup of twenty-seven. He wondered whether this might even be something he could write an important article on, although it was outside his so-called “area of expertise.” Who knows? he thought with new determination. I’m almost sixty-three, divorced, all alone except for Sunny. For a split second he saw the image and heard the bass purring of his loving and lovable orange cat, Sunny Jim. Who knows? Wouldn’t that surprise Marlene! It’d just fry her!
    He frowned briefly, recalling that three, four, perhaps five times—Was it twenty years ago?—he’d planned to write an article for one of those cat fancier magazines he’d paged through while he and four earlier cats had waited their turn at a vet’s office. He pictured a pair of litter boxes, side by side—Number one only in box two, an’ number two only in box one. He had experimented for twelve days by changing the locations of the litter boxes and had discovered that cats—at least his four cats—preferred using one box solely for poop and the other solely for pee, and only when the boxes were more than thirty-five feet apart would any of them begin to use just one box for both of its bodily wastes.
    That would still be a good article to write, he thought. He knew his notes on this experiment and conclusions were—somewhere.
    Grinning, he looked at his watch. Forty-five minutes till class. A block ahead of him a car pulled out of a parking place in front of his bank. Lucky! he thought, and he parked his small vehicle with the practiced ease he was secretly proud of.
    Whitehead felt vaguely surprised to see that the meter had no time on it. As he fed it a quarter for half an hour, brief images of himself finding his car ticketed near here two years ago passed through his mind. The fine had been $25, and he reexperienced a sudden brief rush of irritation.
    Inside the bank lobby, he called up his checking balance—$1,645.57—and requested $160 from the cash machine. Then, momentarily previewing himself at post-holiday sales on Friday and Saturday and Sunday, he withdrew an additional hundred dollars. As he put this money and the two receipts into his billfold, Professor Whitehead briefly pictured the interior of a bagel shop just two doors from the bank.
    Leaving the lobby, he started toward his Honda, paused, noticed that his stomach was again issuing a request for food, began to salivate, and walked amiably and self-forgivingly to the bagel shop. Dieting will work better after this Thanksgiving is behind me, he assured himself. Entering, Winston Edmund Whitehead half-consciously imagined hard bready crust between his teeth and against his tongue. Two people were ahead of him in line. As he got behind the second one, a third person, a dark-haired young woman approached from behind, tugged on his overcoat sleeve, and then squeezed into line in front of him.
    “What are you doing, miss?” he asked in a loud voice. The woman took no notice. Professor Whitehead phrased his question differently.
    “You, in the red hat—why did you cut in front of me just now?” he said.
    Half turning, the young woman appealed to others in the shop: “They saw I was here first. I was in line behind this man here, and I just left the line to get a couple other things. But this was still my place in line!”
    While she was speaking, the other two customers had made their purchases and were leaving. The tactic had succeeded, and the woman in the red hat was now at the counter with money in her hand.
    As she pushed past him, leaving the shop with a smile, Professor Whitehead called loudly at her back, “Be like a New Yorker, if you have no decency or self-respect. It’s your own choice.”
    The six customers behind him averted their gazes. The middle-aged man at the counter blandly asked Professor Whitehead what he wanted.
    Whitehead’s tongue and teeth anticipated the sensations of two kinds of seeded bagels—sesame and poppy. An image of poppy seeds between his teeth looking like dozens of small cavities decided the matter.
    “I’ll have two—no, make that three sesame bagels—please,” he said.
    Striding from the shop, he bit a large piece from one of fresh-baked bagels. Ahead of him, standing near his station wagon, Whitehead saw a woman in blue jeans and a mink coat eating a chocolate bar. Salivating now for chocolate and visualizing the candy counter of the news store on the corner, Whitehead whispered to himself, “To the rear—march!” Entering it in quest of a Snickers bar, he dropped his half-eaten bagel back into the small white paper bag.
    From his place at the end of a line of customers leading to the candy counter and cashier, Winston Whitehead noticed huge stacks of the Times, the Courant, and the Journal. Above and behind these newspapers, he saw a new brightly lit alcove recessed into the side wall, lined with racks of magazines. Two large hand-lettered signs on either side of the alcove reminded all that THIS IS NOT A LIBRARY! Within the alcove, Whitehead saw four “adult” magazines whose names he recognized and several dozen more whose names he’d never before encountered.
    “Sandy,” he said under his breath. Professor Whitehead stepped out of the line and walked to the alcove. Very like her, he thought, reaching for a thick, bright, glossy magazine whose cover featured the narrow, high-cheeked face of a smiling young woman with straight blond hair and slightly bucked teeth. He pulled a copy of the magazine up from the rack.
    “Good jumpin’ Joseph!” he whispered. “Except for them!” He shook his head and smiled wryly at the disparity. Major sex lures, he thought. Quintessential. Sandy, as he saw her in his mind, was a slight young woman of twenty wearing sandals, jeans, a T-shirt, and a denim jacket. Her high small breasts and perpetually erect nipples had provoked fantasies within him during the year she had attended his chemistry lectures at a small liberal arts college in Oklahoma twenty-eight years ago. As he pictured Sandy in a front-row seat, her hand stretched over her head to ask him a question, he became vaguely aware that he was experiencing the mild tingling of sexual arousal.
    Flower child, he thought. He felt momentarily sad. In what was to have been her senior year, she had transferred to the school of business. One afternoon, twenty-six years ago, she had stopped to chat with him on the campus quadrangle and had told him how an introductory economics class had excited her and totally changed her thinking about life, the world, and everything. Standing close to her as she rhapsodized, Whitehead had found himself staring for the first time at her mouth. She was wearing braces, and her severely bucked front teeth were already much closer together. He’d hated studying economics himself and only half listened but had nodded encouragingly all the while Sandy spoke. When she paused, he’d said, glancing from her mouth to her wide blue eyes, “I think that you’ve made an excellent decision, Miss King.” He’d meant about having her teeth fixed, but he had been wise enough not to specify that.
    Now, in the News Rack decades later, he smiled to recall his tact. He’d seen her name on the graduation program two years later and had caught a very distant glimpse of her waist-length blond hair as she went up to receive her diploma among the cum laude students. Where are the snows . . . ? he thought. Sandra King, you’re now nearly fifty—if you’re still alive somewhere. You might be a grandmother.
    Someone jostled him to reach a newspaper. Whitehead focused abruptly on the magazine in his hand. The slender, twenty-ish blond who stared back from the magazine’s cover with (almost) Sandy’s face was clad only in a red satin string bikini. She was clutching her small fists against her monstrous naked breasts, flattening them partially into the shape of massive mushroom caps. Her dark eyebrows and a dark streak up the part of her hair made it moot that she was a natural blond.
    A world-class example of silicon-based life, Whitehead thought, repeating the essence of a joke he’d made up six years ago when a student had asked why all life forms on earth were based on compounds of carbon instead of its cousin element silicon. After explaining that nature tends to be lazy and uses less energy making compounds from carbon which is a lighter element, he had added spontaneously, chiefly for his own amusement, “Of course, if robots ever learn to make their own silicon chips, they’ll be a kind of exception—and from another point of view, artificially endowed females might already be considered a form of silicon-based life.”
    No one from the computer club had complained, but, according to the dean (whom Whitehead had distrusted for two decades), four young women had, and so he’d been obliged to apologize publicly for making a sexist remark in his classroom. He still suspected that no one had objected, and he wondered what would have happened if, claiming academic freedom, he’d refused to apologize. He’d realized, however, that it was a tactless remark, and it had seemed right that he disavow it. It did rankle him the following month, though, that a teacher who’d made a far more heinous remark had lied and been exonerated. A young woman on the tennis team had gone to class in shorts, and Herman Fischer had said, “Your legs look powerful enough to crush a man’s skull!” After she and eight classmates had complained, Fischer swore that he’d been innocently complimenting her strength, nothing more, and that he would certainly have said the same thing about her arms if she hadn’t been wearing a jacket that day. Some faculty members whispered that Fischer was the dean’s pet, perhaps even the dean’s eyes and ears.
    A middle-aged man jostled Whitehead while reaching for copies of Oui and Hustler, and Professor Whitehead, like Walter Mitty, again returned to the present. He glanced at the hand-lettered sign nearest him and smiled, recalling both visually and aurally two instances in his past when obnoxious cashiers had shouted “This ain’t a library!” at him—once when he was twelve and once again during the summer after his divorce sixteen years ago. He blushed slightly and felt vague anger. He glanced over his shoulder toward this shop’s cashier, fully prepared to counterattack should this person have a similar attitude toward magazine customers. Faintly disappointed, Whitehead saw that the cashier was a young woman who was totally busy with nearly a dozen customers.
    Taking the magazine with him to the rear of the line, Whitehead began to glance through it. It was called, he noted, ZeBra and featured (according to its cover slogan) “the Himalayas of XXX-cup hooters.” In the center of the magazine he found five pages and a fold-out that featured the Sandy-faced young woman. She went by the name Busty Towers, and a pseudo-interview dealing with her supposed appetites accompanied the dozen photos of her. In most of these Ms. Towers stared directly at the viewer with puckered lips. In all of them, unlike her cover photo, her breasts were totally exposed and resembled a pair of over-inflated pale pink party balloons. Each was somewhat larger than her own head and decidedly rounder.
    Sweet Joseph, he thought with mild sadness, why would such a pretty young girl do this to herself? Is she some sort of moron? What’s this sex-lure type o’ work pay her, anyhow? Below Whitehead’s threshold of consciousness, the faces of one young and two middle-aged movie stars—whose recent implants had made the front pages of the supermarket tabloids—flashed past his mind’s eye.
    As he began to estimate Ms. Towers’ health risks, Professor Whitehead found himself jolted back yet again by the cashier’s gentle voice. “What’ll it be for you, sir?” she asked with unprofessional civility.
    Professor Whitehead put the issue of ZeBra on the counter and said, “And two—no—three Snickers bars.” He set the candy and a twenty on the counter next to the magazine. A large clock behind the cashier told him he now had fifteen minutes till class. He glanced at his watch to confirm this.
    O’Shit, he thought, smiling at his favorite “Irish oath” and taking his change and the brown paper bag with his four purchases. The bank was less than a mile from the college, and he was not in the least concerned about being late, but he knew that he probably wouldn’t have time to leave the magazine in his office. As he drove, he rapidly visualized a series of scenarios: he could leave the brown paper bag in his car on the seat or under the seat or on the seat under his car blanket, or he could take it to his office and risk being perhaps up to five minutes late for class, or he could put it temporarily into his departmental mail box for three hours and take the chance that no one would pull it out by mistake or out of curiosity, or he could carry it to class and either put it on his lectern or roll it loosely and put it into his lab coat pocket, or, if he’d kept the briefcase his wife had given him for his birthday six years before their divorce, he could put it inside that—and perhaps lock it, perhaps not. He felt no pressure to decide yet. Automatically and unaware of his actions, he ate one of the Snickers bars.
    Traffic and the traffic lights favored him. As he drove the last half mile Professor Whitehead, as if in a kaleidoscope, saw images and heard sounds and smelled the odors he associated with the three women whose breasts he’d seen in the flesh during his adult life.
    Those of Marlene had been the largest: B-cups when they’d courted and married, then C-cups as her weight increased by sixty pounds over the next fourteen years. Playmates, he thought. You were mine, and I was yours—for maybe those first two years. He felt a chill between his shoulders. He’d known Marlene the longest, and yet today his memory of her was very brief.
    Abruptly he felt a dark, crisp, cold, starry night. In Denver, at a chemistry teachers’ convention where he was interviewing for his first job, a fellow grad student named Lew invited him for a beer at a small topless bar near the motel where they both were staying. Lew, thirty-three and the father of a three-year-old son and a two-month-old daughter, wore thick black-rimmed glasses and insisted they sit at the rail where the dancers would be. Winston Whitehead, his mind full of that afternoon’s interview, had acquiesced.
    The first dancer was a skinny native American who looked about sixteen. Over a loudspeaker a man’s voice introduced her as “Fawn, our full-blooded Cherokee princess!” She wore only a pair of high-heeled black pumps, a green G-string, and a pair of white cone-shaped pasties that looked like sad little dunce caps.
    This young woman had a small tattoo of a rattlesnake on her right shoulder, and her high, tiny breasts and long straight hair had swayed slightly as she languidly danced to some recorded trumpet music. She never glanced at the men near her but seemed to be gazing through the far wall over their heads, mentally elsewhere.
    Lew had whistled and waved a five dollar bill at her, but she took no notice, and when the music stopped she simply walked behind a curtain. Over the noise, Lew shouted that she must be stoned on drugs, and, as Lew drained his first beer and speculated loudly on the charms that were yet to come, Winston Whitehead felt strangely melancholy and excused himself. He walked to the bar, sent a fully clad waitress to Lew with a fresh Coors, and went out into the December air to look for a cab. There had been none, and he’d walked two miles in the chill to the motel.
    Whitehead’s third woman—“My joy,” he whispered—was Elaine Golden, a librarian who had lived in his apartment building. Almost thirteen years ago they’d begun a brief, discreet affair. Elaine had been twenty-nine, and Professor Whitehead had recently turned fifty. Vivacious and witty, with the petite body of a young Olympic gymnast, Elaine had loved him to make love to her prominent nipples before and during their other love-making.
    Today as he drove onto campus, Whitehead frowned with pain as he heard once again some phrases of the phone call that had told him how Elaine—her jaw and throat both crushed—had been killed by bus. He shivered, drew a deep breath, and parked his Honda outside the science building.
    As he walked through the front door, Whitehead carried both paper bags, the white and the brown. He still had almost seven minutes till class time. Whispering “office” to himself, he strode to his small private den and unlocked the lap drawer of his desk. He glanced again at the Sandy-like face of Ms. Towers for almost half a minute, feeling some slight pity that caused him to shake his head and gently gnaw his lower lip—yet dimly aware of that faint pre-arousal tingling once more.
    “So!” he said aloud, locking the magazine in his desk. “Once more unto the breach!” He got to the large third-floor lecture hall with nearly a minute to spare and donned his long white lab coat. He smiled theatrically at the seventy-odd young faces that glanced toward him and smiled inwardly to see that his department head was present for a semi-annual classroom observation of his teaching. Showtime, he thought with total confidence. For two decades he had been rated first or second in his department and always among the top seven of the whole faculty.
    “Mr. Wagner, Ms. Gardner,” he said smiling at two students in the front row, “please distribute these to your classmates. Everybody, please print your full names and student numbers at the top, and we’ll see if you can remember what you read about gram molecules any better than you did last week. This short quiz”—here he paused and turned to write QUIZ on the chalkboard—“is scientifically designed to reinforce the importance of one of this course’s twelve major objectives. Once again, as I told you last Friday, you can expect similar questions on our final exam in three weeks.”

2


    At 3:15 p.m. that afternoon, Professor Winston Edmund Whitehead sat down in one of the faux-leather chairs in the conference room of the library. The Faculty Development Self-Study Committee (FDSSC) was meeting to consider once again what improvements could be recommended concerning faculty research assistance. Although budget constraints dictated that nothing would actually be done, a lengthy report had to be prepared in any case for the eyes of the accreditation group that was coming to the college in ten months.
    Only Herman Fischer, a bald mathematician, and Bart Franklin, a slender, graying physicist, were already seated at the oval conference table. Professor Fischer’s face brightened up, and he broke off his conversation with Professor Franklin.
    “Hey, Win!” he said. “Gi’ me some skin!”
    Winston Whitehead glanced across the table and smiled uncomprehendingly.
    “Do you mean shake hands?” he asked. Fischer was sitting on the other side of the table with both hands out of sight.
    “Stop being a shit-head, Whitehead,” said Fischer, leaning his white-bearded face forward confidentially. “I saw you in the News Rack this morning looking through those tit-mags! I’d’ve thought your balls would’ve dried up by now—ha!—like mine!”
    Professor Whitehead slowly smiled in a way that he hoped would look good-natured. Elaine, he half recalled, once had shouted at Fischer that he was an “odious man,” but she’d never explained what Fischer had done or said to provoke her.
    “Hermy,” said Whitehead, watching the doorway, “I could lie to you and say I’m just doing research for a major article on silicon-based life . . . .” He paused to let both Fischer and Franklin chuckle knowingly: his having been disciplined had been the talk of the faculty for at least three days. “But the real truth is a divorced guy like me who ain’t totally dried up yet needs to be really careful about all those incurable diseases we’ve been reading about. Nobody’s ever caught the killer crud from a magazine!”
    Whitehead hoped that his broad smile concealed his anger. Effing shit-head, yourself, Fischer, he thought. Anybody who crushes YOUR skull had better double-diaper it first!
    To change the subject, he asked Fischer directly whether he’d circulated a questionnaire yet to his colleagues. As Dick Lucas of Engineering and Nancy Weinstein of Humanities came in, Fischer raised the current issue of ZeBra above the table. Whitehead froze as he saw the Sandy-like face again, here.
    “Nah,” said Fischer, grinning at everybody. “I ain’t got time for any questionnaires. I’m too busy makin’ sure Fawlty Towers—I mean Busty Towers— is still in good shape. Maybe she’d fix what’s broke in me—if she gives a hoot—er two. Ha!”
    Professor Weinstein, a matronly African-American with a rich contralto voice, smiled tolerantly and said, “Gentlemen, let’s get this charade on the road. I don’t know about all of the rest of you, but I for one have a real life out there. The two reps from Engineering who aren’t here will have see from our minutes what we’ve covered. If they ever do come in, I’ll let them give their reports after the rest of us finish. Herman, let’s start with you.”
    Professor Fischer put the magazine face up on the table in front of him and began to speak: “Nance, I thought I’d wait and see how the others were gonna present their info before I tried to put my section together. I’m still working on some questions, but I don’t have any of ‘em in final draft form yet.”
    “All right, Herman. Nothing to report yet. We’ll expect you to dazzle us next Tuesday. Put you book of paper dolls away then, please, and pay attention to what the others have. Winston, let’s hear from you.”
    Professor Fischer raised his eyebrows and mouthed the word “bitch” in exaggerated fashion as he put the magazine into his briefcase and brought out a pad and pen.
    Professor Whitehead opened the manila file folder he’d brought to the meeting and passed around copies of a typed three-page handout. He explained that the chemistry subdivision of Math and Sciences currently wanted additional support in two areas—research into the environmental impact of waste disposal and research into methods of teaching chemistry to undergraduates who were less prepared than students of previous years.
    Professor Fischer let out a loud “Ha!” and interrupted the presentation: “Winny, all you’ve ever published since you came here are dinky little articles on how you teach. At least Lem Potter runs hundreds of little tests on the pollution in Long Island Sound with his chemical knowledge. So what the hell are you doing with your degree?”
    Whitehead said nothing but glanced expectantly at Nancy Weinstein who was reading his handout. Usually, he’d recalled, she would admonish people about carrying on cross-talk during her meetings.
    Fischer continued: “When I was an undergrad, the biggest joke at my university was the head of the School of Pharmacy. He never wrote anything but historical articles—nothing that was real research in his field. Once he even wrote a piece on the history of suppositories! You wouldn’t wanna know what his nickname was after that! It was sorta like Shhh-Head! But not quite.”
    While Fischer spoke, Whitehead recalled that Marlene had often-often-OFTEN complained that his articles are all pedagogical—how to teach chemistry; how to get students to comprehend; how to get them to remember—that he never did any important research after college—how disappointed she was with him—that even his doctoral dissertation from a fourth-rate university announced his life of professional failure: it detailed his two unsuccessful attempts to synthesize a complex hydrocarbon.
    Whitehead smiled with mild irony as he recalled her grounds for divorce—severe mental cruelty toward her—which he’d not contested. For over a decade he’d tried to explain to Marlene that in science it was just as important to report what wouldn’t work as what would. His dissertation had saved others thousands of wasted hours, just as two other dissertations reporting similar unsuccessful attempts had also done.
    Whitehead pulled his suit jacket a little tighter around his chest and recalled how he’d tried to defend his articles to her: In times of grade inflation, when students are worse and worse prepared for high school—let alone college—for the good of the future of our country, we have to invent techniques of adapting the subject to the students, and so on. My special mission, my gift, if you will, figuratively speaking, of course, is to maintain the dikes and plug as many holes as I can. At times he’d told Marlene that he was on the cutting edge of teaching: I’m devising a way of combining the Gestalt Psychology of Goodman and Perls with the Transactional Analysis of Eric Berne and am adapting them to classroom use. (In this, Professor Whitehead had been—and was still—deceiving himself. In reality he’d eclectically combined his kindergarten-teacher gentleness with some conditioning techniques derived fourth-hand from B. F. Skinner and some ancient Army techniques dating back to his two years in the Chemical Corps, where he’d taught grade-school dropouts how to don and clear a gas mask—plus the basic practical reason for bothering to do so.)
    Whitehead was suddenly aware that Bart Franklin had asked him a question and was waiting for an answer. Whitehead covered up, claiming that he’d skipped lunch and that his blood sugar was now running low. He asked Franklin to repeat his question.
    Franklin nodded sympathetically and did so: “I said I was reading a book by that Hawking fellow this weekend—not his Brief History of Time that none of us ever finished reading, but the other one—Black Holes and Baby Universes. In it, Hawking confesses that he himself doesn’t think in terms of equations. Instead, he sort of pictures things in his mind and later comes up with the equations. It’s that way, too, with Charlie Sherman and me in physics, and I was wondering which way it is for you.”
    Before Whitehead could speak, Herman Fischer interrupted and fortuitously gave him a chance to collect his thoughts.
    “That’s way it is with most mathematicians—except for Ramanujan. Just about all of us picture stuff first.”
    “Rama who?” said Franklin.
    “Rama-NEW-jan—a self-taught dude from India who was one of the Einsteins of math. He thought in equations—but that’s pretty rare. If he was still alive today, he’d probably be studying black holes in India—like the Black Hole of Calcutta. Or ones in outer space—like the black hole of Uranus! Ha! Or the black holes . . . .”
    “Herman, get a grip on yourself,” said Professor Weinstein softly but firmly.
    “Or the black holes of yer spouse,” Fischer finished in a stage whisper.
    “We usually think in equations in chemistry,” said Whitehead decisively. “It’s just the day-to-day nature of our discipline. We test and measure the elements and compounds that things are made of. Probably the only times chemists think in terms of pictures or images is when we’re fantasizing during mating, but then”—here he smiled broadly and shrugged to reinforce his light humor—”we’re not engaged in chemistry per se, but rather biology.”
    “But you’re using a stirring rod, so you’re acting like a chemist,” injected Fischer again.
    Professor Weinstein opened her mouth to reprimand him, paused, changed her mind, and said, “In both history and English it’s the most natural thing to visualize a sequence of events and try to get readers to do so, too. I’m not a poet, of course, but I know that with haiku poems a key feature is to express some point with a pair of word pictures or images. In any case, to get back on track, Bart, what were you driving at?”
    Bart Franklin said that the two biggest gaps in the curriculum of the college— besides its lack of any art or music courses—were that students had no chance to study how people or other living things function.
    “When I was an undergrad,” he added, “I had to take at least six hours of biology—half of it focused on human physiology—and at least three hours each of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. That was minimum—required—a must. I loved that stuff and took overloads to get more of it, but here at Tech we don’t have even one bio or psych course on our books. Most of us here are educated folks, and we had more in our high schools than these kids’ll ever get now in college, and we also got more in our undergrad courses than they’ll get if they go for their doctorates—no, let me finish.” Franklin had played variations of this theme for the past ten years, and now Professor Fischer pretended to fall asleep with his head on the conference table.
    Professor Franklin raised his open palms and grinned amiably. “Maybe that is a little too strong, but notice how all of us here—we can carry on discussions across our fields like this—and most of us can even talk in complete sentences. Anyway, this next part is new. I was going to ask if any of you might like to try to team-teach a course with me that bridged across, say, two or more subjects. It could be a good, cheap way to develop our students’ minds—broaden them, so to speak—and at the same time keep ourselves pretty sharp, too, and maybe even get a free post-doc education from each other.”
    Bart Franklin began to falter as several committee members averted their gaze or made long faces and shook their heads vigorously. He shrugged and concluded, “Anyway, that was just my thought when I was reading Hawking’s book—like what do we have in common beyond being teachers here and what are our basic, central differences? Anyone care to comment?”
    No one spoke.
    After ten seconds of silence Professor Weinstein said, “We’ll include Bart’s idea in the committee’s minutes, and anyone who has further thoughts can bring them up at the next meeting.” She turned to Professor Lucas. “Dick, do you have anything?”
    Professor Dick Lucas shrugged his broad shoulders and shook his head.
    “The hour now being late,” she said, “and your two colleagues being a pair of no-shows, I’m just going to distribute my own handout for you all to take with you to read and think about. And I’ll see that you all get copies of the minutes by this Friday. No—I mean next Monday. We’re coming up on a holiday, people. Well, everyone have an excellent turkey-day, and, Bart, thank you for taking the minutes for us again. Bless your heart. Do I hear a motion to adjourn?”
    As they rode down in the elevator, Professor Weinstein said, “Bart, perhaps we should forward your thoughts to the Curriculum Self-Study Committee. That may be the most appropriate body to consider them.”
    Herman Fischer looked at Bart Franklin and said, “Pretty neat way to find out who are all the really rotten teachers in other departments, Barty! You’d probably think I stink. We’d all be like little—uh—oysters, all opened up on the halfshell. Even if we’ve got a little pearl or two in us somewheres, we’d mostly look like glucky-yucky stuff—like the stuff that’s on the bottom of an emesis basin—if anyone knows what that is.”
    No one spoke until the elevator door opened. Then they muttered vague farewells about having a good holiday. As Winston Whitehead was opening the front door of the library, Herman Fischer grabbed his coat sleeve and said, “Hey, Wind—I mean Win—if you ever find a couple more ways not to make di-methyl-ethyl-lucy-ricky-n-fred-vaseline, you be sure to write ‘em all down for us.”
    Whitehead, who stood eight inches taller than Fischer, looked down at the mathematician. Don’t be baited, he thought, smiling. And don’t try to crush his skull.
    With a gloved hand, Whithead gently patted Fischer’s bald head three times and replied, “I will, Herm. I will. And when I do publish my findings, I’ll make sure to give credit to you as my sole source of encouragement and inspiration.”

3


    Following this faculty meeting, Winston Edmund Whitehead walked to his office and retrieved his copy of ZeBr.a He took it to his two-room apartment, paged through it in a mildly melancholy manner for twenty minutes, and then bundled it up with last week’s newspapers to be recycled. Around 7:00 p.m., he fed his orange cat and heated a TV dinner for himself. Two evenings later, he took the four students out for a Thanksgiving dinner.
    Whitehead was never reprimanded for having repeated his silicon joke at the meeting—nor for the three other times he did so before he retired at age sixty-seven. And neither during all that interval nor during the remainder of his life did he ever mention to anyone or even recall to himself the thoughts he’d once had about the process by which his mind might have been making some of its decisions. As for his litter-box discovery, Whitehead thought about it twenty-three more times, and once drafted a 357-word summary of his findings—which he mislaid later that day.



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