An old lecture hall, cavernous, where dirt and decay have already won the battle and must now await the slow returns of time. Penderson, fading dauphin of objective positivism, academic prince of post-symbolic logic, articulates from the stage in precise fashion:
“The complexity of the problem accelerates with age. The world spins Westward. Hottentots lose their nose rings. Braque paints in blocks. Democracy seeks its own level and…”
His forefinger wags. His chin dances like a bobbin as he orbits the podium on a lengthening tether. From the nooks and crevices of the hall, from its scarred wood paneling, come strange acoustic tricks. Sometimes he hears his own voice echoing back to him, stripped of its basso profundo, attenuated by static and vowels of tin, as if they—the CIA, the FBI, some far stealthier acronymic agency founded in a recurrent dream-nightmare to confirm his significance and feed the fires of his paranoia—have implanted a tiny microphone in his lower mastoid to record all he says and hears. He shakes his head to cancel the buzzing and tufts of dry plastered-down hair spring up about his ears.
In the front rows the scribes are scribbling; in the back, a guilty susurrus of newspapers. Outside, the sky begins to clear. A ray of afternoon sun finds its way through the high chalky windows and laces Penderson’s wrist. He is warmed. He feels something that could be defined as pleasure, and his language grows more eloquent.
“Rationale…exegesis…epiphany…exacerbate!”
The blood is moving beneath his belt. He has been impotent for nearly a fortnight, but he suspects that soon it will be over.
After the lecture, the more avid ones mill about the podium, priming him with questions. Their words are halting. They are still unsure in the manipulation of language. For Penderson, their eyes and limbs, their faces and unmarred temples, have become legion. They are the populace of his ascension, the changing fixtures of his days. He sees them passing along the concourse during finals, eyes to the ground, bodies rigid. He sees them lodged in carrels in the library, hour upon hour, with bowed heads and crimped fingers. He watches as they matriculate to other schools throughout the world. And over the years a few return, the winners, their eyes grown self-assured and veiled as his.
He strides along the hall, a serious fellow, yet as image would have it, something of a fool. His suit is too short. His briefcase, unwieldy, slaps against his thigh. The undergraduates make way for him, the numbered rooms stream past. In the department lounge, his mid-afternoon reward awaits: an almond pastry, a cup of French roast heavy on the cream, an hour of guarded conversation with those of his flock.
Today the talk is of funding, the state legislature, the myopia of this year’s dean. The smoke from Penderson’s briar swirls upward in an undying stream. He reads The Times, Sunday edition. By Thursday he will have finished the entire tome, only to discover they have failed to mention him once again.
As he looks down from his sixth floor office in the new humanities building—dedicated to Rockefeller or Zellerbach or some other scion of monopoly capitalism—as he peers down at the sheer drop from his sealed window, it is not vertigo that claims him so much as the need to plunge. Not a suicidal plunge, but slow and graceful with the air cleansing his cheeks and his mind, the world rising up to meet his singular embrace.
This is his office, his domain. To an observer, the scattered books and papers, the dog-eared manila folders and awkwardly crammed shelves, appear as chaos. But Penderson knows where everything is, knows it perhaps too well. This room is impregnated with his life, his odors: the aromatic Dutch tobacco, his sweat despite the air conditioning, the pungent tang of the liniment that soothes his lower back. Even the unadorned walls are not so by chance. For upon their blankness he can formulate and demolish his systems at will. Or better still, he can dream. He can feed the engines of his own fantasy. He can restructure history or fashion the fickle future in whatever form he believes necessary to maintain his survival.
His office hours are over. The door is locked. The steps that pass, faintly audible, now and again in the hall, are surely not for him.
Taking the tall green bottle from the right hand drawer of his desk, Penderson unscrews the cap and takes a solid pull. He leans back in his swivel chair, and the silent bearings turn. He stares at the wall, beige and empty, and for a moment he is falling.
He remembers the wine shops…the salty black olives…the statue of Athena at Delphi. Once more, the pupils of his eyes are bright and avid as he straightens his tie in a mirror propped against whitewashed plaster; once more, the taste of resin clings to the back of his tongue.
They have been up all night, and Meuralt is leading him down into the salty brightness of the Aegean dawn. The dark boys are laughing by the shoreline. The sun catches on their teeth, their nails, the hair upon the backs of their arms. He follows them, offers them coins and bracelets, and he strikes a bargain in the shadows of the pier.
Late that night, while he is sleeping, they will come to his hotel room. They will bind him with the rough ropes of the harbor and silence his tongue with wine-drenched silk. They will steal him away in the darkness, in a small wooden vessel, its solo canvas trimmed to billow and snap in the clean Attic breeze. And perhaps, beneath an untouched moon, they will take him sailing off the edge of the world.
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