It Will Come to Me (24 page)

Gradually, the spasms subsided. They were breathing more normally, starting to regain composure, but then their eyes happened to meet once more. “Stuck,” said Ruth, widening her eyes and mouthing the word voicelessly “Stuck!” shrieked Ricia, pounding her fists against the wall. Now they were howling in unison, quite out of control. A quick hard rap on the door startled them into quivering silence. “Excuse me,” said a male voice. “Ned here.” Ned was the proprietor. “I'm going to have to ask you to break it up in there. Only one customer at a time in the restrooms.”

“Yes sir,” said Ricia. She'd clapped a hand over her mouth and turned her back to Ruth, who was standing over the sink splashing cold water on her face.

“Take your time,” said Ned. “We just can't have—”

“Sorry,” Ricia called out. She sounded snide and facetious behind the muffling hand and that was almost enough to start the cycle again. They waited, frozen, until the danger had passed.

“You go first,” Ruth whispered to Ricia. “Give me a minute.”

“Just one thing,” said Ricia. Her hand was on the doorknob as she glanced back at Ruth. Her face was pale and drawn, her eyes rimmed with red, for all the world as though she'd been weeping. “Tell me quick. Is there anything else you're working on?”

“I started a series of sketches. They're very patchy. Just little vignettes.”

“If I were you I'd put the novel aside. Put it away. Go back to those sketches and see where they take you. Or start something new. It doesn't matter. Just sit down. Just write.”

W
hen is a life not worth living?” Ben asked. This was the fourth meeting of Philosophy 101 and he was doing his best to stimulate discussion.

Four hands shot up in front, but Ben looked past them. He was pitching this question to the great middle, and he was willing to wait for a response. He had learned, over the years, to fight down panic in the face of silence. He had also learned to use his gaze to challenge and he did this now, trawling systematically along the rows for a tug of response.

This was an unusually sludgy group; he'd never known that
question not to snag at least a few beyond the front row. But today even the pink-haired
compañero
, on whom he'd relied heavily during the past week's class discussions, was looking away Just as Ben was about to give the nod to one of the eager beavers in front he noticed movement in the back, a stirring among the jocks. At first he thought it was a twitch or a squirm that had caught his eye—the athletes were often restless in repose—but no, it was a hand, unmistakably raised and signifying a desire to speak. It belonged to Benson Boland, the 290-pound offensive lineman from Emir, Texas. Just this morning Ben had been reading about him in the
Lantern.
“See this guy?” he'd said to Ruth, calling her over to look at a crouching Benson Boland, snarling for the camera in the
Lanterns
sports pages. “He's in my 101.”

“Ah, Benson,” said Ben. “When do
you
think a life is no longer worth living?”

“When you're really really old,” was Benson's reply, “and there's nothing worth living for.”

Heads turned in front and hands shot up in the middle rows, but Ben was too grateful to Benson for breaking the silence to throw him to the dogs immediately. “Benson has a point,” he said, backing up a few steps and allowing his voice to swell. “I think there's a general consensus that there's something about growing old that sometimes makes life less worth living. But what is it exactly? It can't just be the number of years you've lived, can it?”

Another silence, but this time Ben could hear gears working inside it. “What is it about growing old?” he asked once again.

“Older people get … conditions,” said a girl in the third row who had never spoken before.

“What kind of conditions?” asked Ben.

“Chronic diseases,” said someone.

“Hearing loss,” said someone else. “Vision loss. Tooth loss.” A few students giggled.

“Is life worth living with a chronic disease?” asked Ben. “Is it worth living with cancer? Is it worth living with heart disease?”

“It depends,” said the never-before-heard-from girl.

“Is it worth living with chronic pain?”

“It depends,” said someone else. “If the pain is too bad—”

“So there's a point past which pain makes a life not worth living,” said Ben. “We can agree on that. Is life worth living when you're blind or deaf?”

“It depends.”

“Depends on what?” asked Ben.

“Your attitude.”

“What does your attitude depend on?”

Ben folded his arms and leaned back against the desk as the class considered; this was the position he assumed during his Socratic anglings. He maintained it until a solitary hand went up. “There in back,” he called out, pointing to Sirlancelot Mims, the promising cornerback from Shreveport, Louisiana.

“My grandmother's got cataracts,” said Sirlancelot. “She can hardly see. She walks with a cane. Her feet swell up and she has to wrap her legs in Ace bandages. I think she's got cancer too. At least she used to have it.”

Ben saw where this was going. “So what is your grandmother's attitude toward these conditions, Sir … ah … lancelot?”

“She's got a real good attitude. She's in the kitchen cooking all day, and she goes to church every week. She's learning to read her Bible in Braille. She raised the grandchildren and now she's taking care of the great-grandchildren—”

“Ah,” said Ben. “She takes care of the children. Is that important?” The class murmured its assent. Many hands went up, among them this time the pink-haired
compañeros.
“Leslie,” he said. “Why is that important?”

“It's a change in the relationship between the past and the future,” began Leslie Bogdanovich, whose gender remained stubbornly undivinable. Leslie had already emerged as the best student in the class, with an express-track mind that tended to speed past the local stops. For the benefit of those less quick to connect the concrete and the abstract, Ben jumped in. “Is there a future for Sirlancelot's grandmother?”

“Not so much,” said a muffled voice from somewhere in the third row. The class laughed. Sirlancelot glowered.

“Not … so … much,” Ben repeated soberly, appropriating the allusion and turning it to pedagogical uses. “If we interpret ‘future’ as Sirlancelot's grandmother's
personal
future, that's almost certainly true. What other kinds of future might we have, besides a purely personal future?”

“Something that continues after we're gone,” said a girl in the front row. “Something we're doing or making or working on that will survive us.”

“Like Sirlancelot's grandmother's grandchildren?” asked Ben, turning to write
PLANS AND PROJECTS
in large block letters on the blackboard. “I guess that has to mean Sirlancelot himself. He's his grandmother's project, isn't he? One of them, anyway.” Ben smiled in Sirlancelot's direction. Heads turned toward the back and a murmur arose. Sirlancelot continued to sit stoically, arms crossed over his chest.

“I was just reading a book about Freud's last days,” Leslie Bogdanovich remarked conversationally. He or she—just now Ben
had an intimation it was the latter—did this sometimes, addressing Ben as if the rest of the class were not present. Meanwhile, the back row was seething with movement; Sirlancelot's teammates were leaning over to poke and jab at him and thrust their mugging faces into his. “The Nazis were after him and he was dying of jaw cancer and up until the very end he was working on
Moses and Monotheism …
”

But now it seemed that Rhoda had materialized. In her soundless way she had entered the classroom and was standing at Ben's side and murmuring, “Something's happening. I think you'd better come.” Her manner told him that this was not a moment to ask questions. “Sit tight,” he called over his shoulder as he followed her out the door. “I'm not dismissing class. You might get a jump on Thursday's reading.”

Rhoda was moving down the hall at an alarming clip. Was it a bomb threat? Someone threatening suicide? One of Hayley's ex-husbands roaming the corridors with an AK-47? “What's going on?” he whispered as he speed-walked alongside her—though there was no reason, he supposed, to lower his voice.

“It's Charles Johns,” she said. “In the seminar room. He's shouting.”

Shouting? For that she'd pulled him out of class? The seminar room was down the hall from the Philosophy Department offices and already Ben had learned to tune out the chants and booms and incantations that emanated from Charles Johns's Ecstasy seminar. This shouting was probably just the audio of some shaman whipping himself into a frenzy. Rhoda was five feet ahead of him now. Turning back, she said,
“Really
shouting.” As he followed her into the stairwell, Ben heard it for himself. It was Charles all right, using the full theatrical range of his voice, sliding
it up and down the scale, bellowing like an ogre, shrieking like a panther. And then it came to him. The SCAC inspectors. He'd completely forgotten. Or rather he'd left it to Hayley, which was the same thing. He bolted rudely past Rhoda and sprinted up the stairs.

A small crowd of students and a few faculty members had gathered around the door of the seminar room. They were an odd lot, he noticed through the veil of his distraction—tall, short, tall, short. “All of you, get back to your classes,” said Ben. They moved several yards down the hall. “Go on,” he said. They retreated into the stairwell. “You go too,” he said to Rhoda, who had just caught up with him. She stood her ground. “Go now,” he said, “if you want to be helpful.” Her eyebrows registered surprise—he'd never spoken to her like this—but still she declined to budge. He took her by the shoulders, spun her around, gave her a gentle push. He was surprised at himself, but the authority that had descended upon him seemed to require that he do this. Rhoda was so unprepared to be manhandled that she stumbled a little, then moved away with an offended backward glance. No doubt he'd hear about this later; touching a student was a violation of university policy.

Having emptied the hallway, he opened the door and walked into the seminar room, where all was ominously quiet and had been, Ben realized, for some moments. Charles had the SCAC inspector backed up against a wall. Not a wall, actually, but a bank of windows. The inspector was a slender, balding man in his late thirties or early forties, several inches shorter than Charles and perhaps a hundred and thirty pounds lighter. His clipboard, its pages curled and sprawling, lay upside down on the floor next to an overturned chair. Charles had pressed himself against the
inspector engulfingly, his chin jutting into the space between his rapidly blinking eyes.

“Charles,” said Ben. “Hang on a minute. Let him go. This is my fault. I should have let you know. Let me explain.”

“This person,” said Charles, addressing Ben but continuing to speak into the inspector's forehead in a deep hum that seemed intended not only to intimidate but to lull, “this person invaded my classroom. He walked in during the break and sat down
there”
—he jabbed a finger at the seminar table, as if the inspector's violation had forever contaminated it—”and made free to ask my students a number of idiotic questions. He never explained. He never apologized. I asked him to leave several times. He simply ignored me. Did he not?” He turned for confirmation to the students watching this scene from the far end of the table, horror and delight flickering across their faces. They nodded in unison.

“I should have let you know,” said Ben. “He's here from the state. It's all OK. It's all legitimate.”

“It's not legitimate,” said Charles, swinging his alarmingly reddened face around to glare at Ben. “And so much the worse if he's from the state. I won't have my class disrupted.” With that, he took the inspector by the shoulders and rotated him, much as Ben had done to Rhoda (but not so gently), locked one arm under his chin and the other under his ribs, and frog-marched him across the room and out the door. Ben followed at a distance as this man-and-a-half made its staggering humping progress down the hall. Much of the time, the inspector was walking—albeit under compulsion—but for seconds at a stretch his feet were in the air and he was kicking like a toddler. The crowd Ben had dispersed earlier had reassembled to watch. Stationed in the doorway of the Philosophy Department, the
Lola Lantern
photographer was
taking pictures, flashbulbs popping at stroboscopic speed. Behind the photographer's shoulder, well back in the office, Ben caught a glimpse of Hayley's frightened face.

A few yards short of the stairs, Charles stopped for a moment, as if to consider his options. With an air of disgusted weariness, he let go of the inspector, who slid to the floor in limp folds. As Charles stalked back into the classroom, the inspector got to his knees and then, rather jerkily, to his feet. He shook his head to clear it, ran his hands over his torso diagnostically. Ben approached, calling out apologies, but the inspector raised a hand to stay him. He'd pulled a cell phone from his pocket, and as he hobbled away in the direction of the men's room Ben could see that he was making a call.