Ivyland (8 page)

PROFESSOR FLEER /// IVYLAND COLLEGE /// ONE YEAR AGO

The students give me hope when they do not open their mouths too wide. But this little season has seen slack-jawed awe in the main, and the shrouded inner walls of throats refract things miserably. A quality—let's say coherence—escapes in muted gasps, slipping serpentine toward sunnier rocks. It's humbling to remember humility.

To doubt the primacy of our species, I mean.

He's leaning over my desk, asking for my wife, when I notice. (Truth be told, I have no answer, confirming healthy levels of marital trust.) I can barely snatch a word between the oaf's intimidations. His tie is oddly textured, fish-scaled. Full Windsor knot wrenched as though in pain; it reminds me of a sculptress who worked metal into corkscrewed shapes to strangle and drown her adulterous father in history's clouded stream. One can't recall, sculptress, whether your art ever pitied mom instead.

“There's a caterpillar on your shoulder,” I interrupt, pointing. The detective sneers and crushes it with thumb and forefinger.

They are simply everywhere—the word is
biblical
. Too many warm winters, buttressed by this muggy spring, have yielded a bumper crop of the yellow-speckled creepers. Our campus is their extra-leafy Eden; a formal armistice alone prevents them from wresting control from the deans. Yet I let them feast at Azura's honeyed insistence, will never maliciously kill one lest she catch me in the boyish act. My vermiculate office spider plant is holey testimony of that appeasement, swarming with the busy plague.

“Are you hearing me right now?” the detective blusters, apparently vexed. “You're to help me find certain responsible parties.”

I tell him I'll draw up a list of moral relativists in the department.

“Funny. I'll ask again before we go downtown: Professor Azura Carcassone.”

My wife … crime of passion … exits rising to enable. Sixth floor. She pushes the elevator button with sweet impatience. Inuit cinema to teach. Sylvia, a fiery if cipherlike student of mine, is already descending. Sixty feet below: safety, the ghastly gift shop of Ivyland College Museum. But no. Doors whine open. Four too-similar eyes are locked. Sylvia, my wife shrewdly concludes (and is it any wonder with this quicksilver Sherlock? I blame her sense of noir), has just enjoyed my favorite exhibit, “Gauguin in Tahiti,” which fills the seventh, uppermost floor. Glorious flattening of space, Gothic complex of rilled drapery boiled away to one dimension. Would that I lived within such mazes.

Azura can't help but see her chance. Perhaps a Sylvian tic is prologue. Formalities dispensed, a ruby-encrusted butterfly knife—Christmas gift—enters her at every angle and erogenous zone. Azura alights on the second floor and ecstatically cartwheels en route to fire escape. Ding: doom spills into the lobby. Hot blood folds over the precipice between elevator and gleaming wood floor. Some clerk, lobotomized townie, ratchets up a scream. Sylvia's slender fist uncurls from the knuckle-crack that announced her fate.

Is what I'm guessing happened.

And tenure was so close this time.

I start shoveling Žižeks, Kirkegaards and Lacans into my briefcase, bare essentials for a portable library. I sprinkle some William James on the pile for good measure. Call my temperament pragmatic. A dusty edition of René Thom's squirts out of my hands, falls open to the butterfly catastrophe.
V = x
6
+
ax
4
+
bx
3
+
cx
2
+
dx
. I kick it back at the bookcase in a mounting fit, wishing I owned Dalí's merciful last painting instead.

“Uh,” says the chuckling detective, whom I'd quite forgotten. “Going somewhere?” The dreariest impasse.

“Coxswain duty. There's a meet against Rutgers today, and I'd hate to disappoint the girls. They've rowed
so
expertly this season.”

“Do a lot of reading on the boat?”

He gestures sardonically at my open Samsonite, overflowing with dense critical thought.

“The proper passage never fails to galvanize an athlete,” I smile, casually holding up a copy of—O, dear—
Discipline and Punish
. I drop it like a catty footnote.

“Did I mention that I'm a cop? And that your wife is wanted for questioning as regards senseless criminal acts?”

“Senseless?” I laugh. “Don't be ridiculous.”

O, double dear.

*

Azura always orders what the fattest man in the restaurant is having. Often with archaic zest. Watch her struggle to not say
Je voudrais
. Adore it when she fails. Thrill at the articles studding her syntax: “It is easy as
a
pie,” she'll insist when begging a favor. By now she's wise to the hiccup and executes it with flourish.

“I love you so much I could cut a off homeless man's nose and catch the rainbows streaming out,” she whispers as I unmoor myself for sleep.

“Let's call that a mistranslation.”

We are exhausted from the day, a visiting artist's new exhibit: “Justice/Mutilation and the Reversed Con,” photo galleries of unknowing dark faces with ghoulish epithets written under skin, liminal smirks of thieves whose ruses have gone all 8-figured. They are African sources of fraudulent e-mails, phony princes and supposed heirs, here made to believe someone has fallen prey to the scam. Only, trust must be established. Our artist teases with the promise of bank-account codes. The signs of good faith are obscene facial tattoos, in baffling, vile English idiom. Strange but irresistible trade. They uphold their end, photograph themselves after hours and days spent under a needle. Of course the numbers never come, but the faces we see are fully expectant, sadness unassembled, inked hate glancing off cheeks and through the gritty lens of a cell phone camera.

“I don't see where material trickery can dovetail so with physical cruelty.”

“Live to breach faith; your faith is breached. What could be simpler than Hammurabi?”

“Don't deserve
that
. And the circuit is false—artist gives up nothing. Can't show her subjects in the days of gathering comprehension. The reversals go unrecognized.”

“Naturally,” Azura says, “the prelude is all that counts.”

She runs fingers through my hair and bites an earlobe.

“If I can't have you, no one can.”

“You have me, Azura.”

In spite of everything, she does.

*

Detective York smiles, knows I cannot escape, splay of a reproduction of Pollock's
Cathedral
dancing fractally beyond smug teeth. And just as I sense the first flex of thigh, divided between fight and flight, my office door flings open, its knob barely missing the detective's gut. Laura, my dourly dressed editor, steps in, clutching a paper that has clearly inspired anxiety.

“
This
is your blurb for Reynolds's new Kant translation?”

“Really can't tell when you crumple it like that. Don't quote.”

“Uh, ma'am …” the burly detective says.

“ ‘Reynolds has untangled the putrid knot of Kant's phrasing and therefore renders unto us a document of masterful inaccuracy.' Really?”

“Some knots should stay tied, Laura.”

“I'm sorry, miss,” Detective York says, “but we were just—”

“Readability? Is that a crime?” Laura interrupts in a monotone shout, putting a hand over the appalled detective's mouth.

“Readability a crime,” I laugh. “It's not even a word outside of focus groups!”

“You're going to have to excuse us,” Laura says, pushing York's reddened, disbelieving face—and by extension York himself—into the hallway. I rush over and lock the door just as he realizes I'm going to. A kick comes, splintering the wood. He kicks again.

“How'd you get on this guy's good side?” my editor asks over continued battering.

“Laura, I would love to discuss the fusillade of Kant's grammatical gaffes and their bearing on the Critique's success, but I, ah, how many police vehicles are outside?”

“Couple. Why?”

“Really should be finding my wife.” I throw my briefcase out the window, straddling the sill. The detective's boot punches a hole in my door and struggles to yank itself back out.

“We may need to thrash things out,” I explain.

“Women. Bonnie's estrogen levels really fuck up our relationship at times.”

“Why, Laura, I had no idea you were a homosexual,” I marvel. She shrugs.

“She and I have our weird way of resolving things, I guess.”

“Bless you for that,” I say.

And jump.

*

When I dip toward sleep but spasm uncontrollably, screaming about the vampire bats who've shadowed me since childhood, soft mangy things that doze under blankets where feet plunge into warm black mist, waking to flutter upon clammy limbs, Azura holds me with tenderness I certainly do not deserve. She tells me it's just a thing, this spasm.

By which she means: it happens to everyone.

By which she means: it's nothing.

But she is constantly forgiving me, which is nice.

*

I land on one of the pulsing orgies caterpillars prefer, maybe millions thick. Have to admit I'm embarrassed to murder so many for convenience's sake. I pull slime and fine-haired carcasses off in gobs.

Other pockets hang together on benches, buildings, bushes. Writhing chain mail. Rappelling on invisible wires from the tattered leaves of trees. Azura is considering a cycle of poems on the wretched creatures, and the contagion of her focus can madden.

“Consider,” she said last night atop the peeling old observatory, “their manners.”

“Yes, they bow to greet each other.” I grabbed a dark handful from the balcony handrail and flung them into cheap-smelling night. “Almost Far Eastern?”

“
Religieux
, essentially. The cocoon
une sorte de purgatoire—
they trust in an afterlife. Paradise.” She lets one squinch along the length of her finger.

“And can it be that the caterpillar who sees a butterfly sees an angel?” I ask in the teasing voice men save for their worst moments with the women they love.

“Who says they'll be butterflies?”

What I know:

• I made the deplorable mistake of reading my wife excerpts from Sylvia's term paper for Philosophy of Psychosexual Criticism.
  
• Azura masturbated to Herzog's
  Lessons of Darkness
  right there in her seat when it premiered in Berlin in ‘92.
  
• I can remember Sylvia's scent, but any sense-record of the act is torched
  ex post facto.
  
• Azura can climax without even her fingers; I've learned to notice when she does it—the micromoans, the muzzled hummingbird pulse after I seem to have punched in for my shift of night terror.
  
• Regarding Herzog, we agree: There is something unhappily erotic about wastelands.
  

What I suppose:

• It would be facetious to say in ill-fated Sylvia and predecessors I see an other to Azura, simplistic to say I see a sameness (for Azura is above all blessedly dissimilar to the world), approaching fact that I see a spark of
  potential
  Azura that must be fanned, for Azura's mortality is more horrific than mine.
  

 

“ ‘Every discipline,” I recited, “is secretly anchored by its articulation of Lacanian lack.' ”

“A lack that by definition is where nothingness and catastrophe fail to be articulated,” Azura replied. She took off her shoes and examined the space between tanned toes.

“ ‘Literature finds the female vampire, a monster whose fanged orifice in Stoker's hands is the paradigm
vagina dentata
.' ”

“I wish this girl would realize,” lamented Azura, “that the mouth is not a substitute vagina but something worthy in itself.” She dipped her bare feet in a pool of caterpillars and laughed lightly at their ticklish touch.

“ ‘Astronomy's black hole, meanwhile, is a fundamental expression of phallic illusion, the ultimate void amongst countless protrusions.' ”

She saw a painful erection trapped in my slacks, but I didn't follow her gaze, didn't look at myself, just watched her face while she stared a stare that trumps the uncanny, and when it was over I'd written sideways in the margin of Sylvia's C+ paper:

But the black hole isn't a void at all; it is a node of unthinkable mass
.

*

I shred through the silk threads festooning our campus, feel caterpillars in my hair and heart. Singeing, sticky strands and hot spring sun. I stop to lighten my briefcase, tossing less worthy works into a dumpster behind the steamboat-shaped dining hall. How had
Korean for Beginners
made the cut at all? I look up, trying to remember why the hell I bought it, at a tropical sky that sighs Azura's name. Perhaps I'd simply needed a new book—any book—and, being a city boy, liked the menacing glow of Seoul on the cover.

Her Algerian-born parents, Azura recounts, found her newborn eyes resplendent as the Côte d'Azur, moon-baked site of her conception. But protean blue became earthly brown—a sea-change to acquaint her with despair.

“Didn't they understand your eyes could change?”

“You see the blue, buried,” she prompts me from bed.

“I know it's there.”

There's no expanding on such shaky claims. Besides, I'm busy. My class is looking forward to a lecture on the perversities of David Koresh, his branch, his ranch. The research solders my senses together. Babies sinking in blue dark pools. Brides of Israel anointed early and often. Flock painted, drenched, in their own lambs' blood. Did he figure it for the new Masada? Did the alignment with Passover bubble cheerfully in his flutes of marrow?

“
Regardez-moi
,” Azura pouts in periphery, nightgown waterfalling off.