Six Years

At exactly 3:00 P.M., I let in the first student. She wanted to discuss theories on Locke and Rousseau, two political scientists better known now by their Lost TV show reincarnations than their philosophical theories. The second student had no real reason to be here other than to—and I am being blunt here—suck up. Sometimes I wanted to hold up a hand and say, “Bake me some cookies instead,” but I get it. The third student was into grade groveling; that is, she thought that her B+ paper should have been an A-, when in fact it probably should have been a B.

This was how it was. Some came to my office to learn, some came to impress, some came to grovel, some came to chat—that was all okay. I don’t make judgments based on these visits. That would be wrong. I treat every student who walks through those doors the same because we are here to teach, if not political science, maybe a little something about critical thinking or even—gasp!—life. If students came to us fully formed and without insecurities, what would be the point?

“It stays a B plus,” I said when she finished her pitch. “But I bet you’ll be able to get the grade up with the next essay.”

The buzzer on the clock sounded. Yes, as I said, I keep the times in here strict. It was now exactly 3:29. That was how, when I looked back at all that would happen, I knew exactly when it all first began—between 3:29 P.M. and 3:30 P.M.

“Thank you, Professor,” she said, standing to leave. I stood with her.

My office hadn’t been changed one iota since I became department head four years ago, taking over this room from my predecessor and mentor, Professor Malcolm Hume, secretary of state for one administration, chief of staff for another. There was still the wonderful nostalgic essence of academic disarray—antique globes, oversize books, yellowing manuscripts, posters peeling off the wall, framed portraits of men with beards. There was no desk in the room, just a big oak table that could seat twelve, the exact number in my senior thesis class.

There was clutter everywhere. I hadn’t bothered redecorating, not so much because I wanted to honor my mentor as most believed but because, one, I was lazy and really couldn’t be bothered; two, I didn’t really have a personal style or family photographs to put up and didn’t really care for that “the office is a reflection of the man” nonsense or if I did, then this indeed was the man; and three, I always found clutter to be conducive to individual expression. There is something about sterility and organization that inhibits spontaneity in a student. Clutter seems to welcome free expression from my students—the environment is already muddled and messed, they seem to think, so what further harm could my ridiculous ideas do to it?

But mostly it was because I was lazy and couldn’t be bothered.

We both stood from the big oak table and shook hands. She held mine a second longer than she had to so I disengaged intentionally fast. No, this doesn’t happen all the time. But it does happen. I’m thirty-five now, but when I first started here—the young professor in his twenties—it happened more often. Do you remember that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where one student wrote “LOVE YOU” on her eyelids? Something like that happened to me in my first semester. Except the first word wasn’t “LOVE” and the second word had been switched from “YOU” to “ME.” I don’t flatter myself about it. We professors are in a position of fairly immense power. The men who fall for this or believe that they are somehow worthy of such attention (not to be sexist, but it was almost always men) are usually more insecure and needy than any daddy-issued coed one might happen upon.

As I sat down and waited for the next student to arrive, I glanced at the computer on the right side of the table. The college’s home screen was up. The page was typically collegiate, I guess. On the left, there was a slideshow of college life, students of all races, creeds, religions, and genders having a studiously good time, interacting with one another, with professors, extracurricular activities, you get the idea. The banner on the top featured the school’s logo and most recognizable buildings, including prestigious Johnson Chapel, a large-scale version of the chapel where I had watched Natalie get married.

On the right part of the screen, there was a college newsfeed and now, as Barry Watkins, the next student on the sign-up sheet, entered the room and said, “Yo, Prof, how’s it hanging?” I spotted an obituary in the feed that made me pause.

“Hey, Barry,” I said, eyes still on the screen. “Take a seat.”

He did so, throwing his feet up on the table. He knew that I didn’t care. Barry came every week. We talked about everything and nothing. His visits were more watered-down therapy than anything in the realm of academia, but again that was perfectly okay with me.

I took a closer look at the monitor. What had made me pause was the stamp-size photograph of the deceased. I didn’t recognize him—not at that distance—but he looked young. In a way, that was not unusual for the obituaries. Many times the college, rather than securing a more recent photograph, would scan in the deceased’s yearbook photograph, but here, even at a quick glance, I could see that this was not the case. The hairstyle wasn’t something from, say, the sixties or seventies. The photograph wasn’t in black-and-white either, something the yearbook had been up until 1989.

Still we are a small college, four hundred or so students per class. Death was not uncommon, but maybe because of the size of the school or my close affiliation as both a student and member of the faculty I always felt somewhat personally involved when someone from here died.

“Yo, Teach?”

“One second, Barry.”

I was now infringing on his clock time. I use a portable scoreboard timer, the kind you see in basketball gyms all over this country, with giant red digital numbers. A friend had given it to me as a gift, assuming because of my size that I must have played hoops. I hadn’t, but I loved the clock. Since it was set to automatically count down from nine minutes, I could see now that we were on 8:49.

I clicked on the small photograph. When the larger one came up, I managed to hold back the gasp.

The name of the deceased was Todd Sanderson.

I had blocked Todd’s last name from my memory—the wedding invite had just said “Todd and Natalie’s Nuptials!”—but, man, I knew the face. Gone was the hip stubble. He was clean-shaven here, his hair closer to a buzz cut. I wondered whether that was Natalie’s influence—she had always complained that my stubble irritated her skin—and then I wondered why I would be thinking about something so asinine.