Eve Morton

Tag: college

  • 31 for 31: History’s Ghost by Eve Morton

    Another Lovecraftian cosmic horror piece.

    History’s Ghost is about a grad student who inherits a dead professor’s class. At first, the narrator is just happy to have some extra cash during the semester, but the old lectures that contain the dead professor’s voice begins to haunt him–and a further mystery unfolds…

    I wrote this during the COVID pandemic, where I ended up recording a lot of my lectures. I was also pregnant during a lot of those recordings, and kept wanting to record ahead of time. Yet I was deeply paranoid that doing so would jinx something, so I put off doing my lectures ahead of time until I was almost nine months pregnant. Then, so I could be both practical and paranoid, I indulged my obsessive thoughts with this story.

    I hope you enjoy it too!

    History’s Ghost

    By Eve Morton

    I knew the professor was dead the moment the school called me. While I was used to last minute teaching posts–being a contract faculty member at a local university gives one all the prestige of being called “doctor” none of the convenience of being treated like one–there was no way that someone could abandon a course like this after only a week into the semester without some kind of tragedy undermining the entire operation. If the original instructor had been a woman, I would have considered her departure to be a quicker-than-first-believed mat leave. But it was a man, named Ralph Anderson, and despite being at the school for the past ten years, I had never heard of him before. 

    “Was he tenured?” I asked, evoking the dangling carrot for many in my profession. “I don’t recognize the name.”

    “He was brilliant,” the head of my department said. She evaded the other question. “I’m sorry you never got a chance to meet him.”

    “I’m sure I’ll get to know him now, through his work.”

    “I suppose we live on in our research. Even if only one person reads the dissertation, it makes it seem like ten years of work has gone somewhere, right?”

    I nodded. Marta detailed the subject area of my new teaching post, all without outright offering me the job for the first fifteen minutes. Though I’d gone to graduate school here, taken one of her classes on Shakespeare, she didn’t seem to recognize me. “I see from your CV that you’ve published a few papers in the area of medieval history. Would his class on the history of the 100 Years War and the Black Death be something you’d be willing to take? On such short notice?”

    “Yes, of course.” I should have let her speak longer, tell me more difficulties. But I had a student debt to pay. “I’d love to teach the course. Sounds fascinating already.”

    “Good. He’s done most of the work already. You’ll find some of his lectures, or the notes for them, already pre-recorded on his online website for the course. The class runs from 2-5 on Monday and Wednesday.”

    I already had a class that term which ran from 1-2:30pm in another part of the campus. When I reminded her of that, she nodded as if she should have realized. I thought she was going to take away the job from me right then–something of which I had already started to allocate the money for in different debts and for different items in my rundown apartment I desperately needed–but she only nodded. 

    “Should be okay. Just start the class a half hour late. Like I said, most of the material has already been recorded. If need be, you can play that for the students until you arrive.”

    “Oh. Okay. That makes sense.” An eerie feeling came over me then, as if there was a ghost in the room. Or rather, as if I was being encouraged to be a ghost in the room, nothing but a conjurer, a lion tamer, for a former professor who no longer had the course, but had done all the work.

    It was here when I understood he was dead. And possibly a suicide, given the sudden nature and the way in which she smiled vaguely and shook my hand on acceptance in a strained, limp grip. Why else do all the work for a class and then suddenly exit the scene? Sure, Dr. Ralph Anderson could have had a heart attack or suffered in a car crash, but this was the Arts Department and we were all a sensitive lot I wanted to feel bad for him; I wanted to mourn him in a way people often feel the need to mourn when they see tied up teddy bears against telephone poles, marking hit and run victims, but I could only be grateful. Joyful. 

    Another class to teach. Another couple thousand in my bank account. I left the meeting feeling elated, almost as much as when I was first rehired by the school as a professor and not as a grad student, thinking it would lead to a career and not piecemeal postings here and there. I even got a bit drunk at the campus bar, spending my money before I even had it. When I mentioned the professor’s name to the bartender at the professor-frequented establishment, he had no idea who I was talking about.

    “Ralph Anderson,” I said again, my speech slightly slurred and animated. “He taught medieval history.”

    Cameron, the bartender, opened his mouth to say something, but then shook it. 

    “What? Did you pick him up one night?”

    “Not exactly,” Cameron said, and then, flirting with me because he could, he said, “Don’t be jealous, Monroe. I still only have eyes for you.”

    “But you know the name?”

    “I know a medieval history professor. Or rather, I knew him. This old guy used to come in here all the time and tell me things about the Black Death. You know, the bubonic plague.” He pronounced it boo-bonic. “A lot of fun things there, believe it or not. Like night pigs! Did you know they had two sets of pigs develop because of all the bodies in the street? One set of pigs that ate during the day, tore the bodies open and ate the blood and infected flesh–only to die again in the street, of course–and then there were the nocturnal pigs, the ones that dug through the graveyard dirt and got the corpses up from the ground, and then of course, they ate them and died too.”

    “That’s disgusting,” I said. “I’m going to be sick.”

    “Yeah, well, he made it funny. But I don’t remember his name. I called him Night Pig for a while there.” Cameron furrowed his brows. “I wonder if I upset him, and that’s why he didn’t come back.”

    “How long ago?”

    Cameron made a gesture that meant years, years, when you were a wee babe. He gave me another refill on my beer, but I was now feeling ill. I said so aloud, and so I left my drink half-finished with a nice tip for Cameron. I drew a pig on the bill before I left. I had no idea why; it just felt like the thing I should be doing.

    At home, I fell asleep under a pile of old laundry and my ever-present and always in the apartment blanket which moved from couch to computer chair and back again. When I woke up a few hours later, I guzzled water. I recalled dreams of medieval England with roves of wandering flagellants, whipping themselves in the name of Jesus, so they could fight the plague and please God again. I didn’t remember ever reading anything like that before in any books on the era, yet I knew it to be true. Something Cameron said? About the former history prof who also drank under his gaze, maybe even with a guiding hand?

    A chill passed through me. I grabbed my blanket, curling it around me like a king, and sat in front of my computer with a glass of water. I wanted to review the material for my course, since I had an alert that the online system had been transferred to me. When I accessed it, I saw the outside page as a student. The syllabus, the assignments, the readings. Basic stuff. Only a handful of personalized announcements were present, most of which were answering frequent questions about textbook edition or policy on plagiarism software. The course had only been going for a week and the last announcement was one cancelling this week’s session.

    I’m out of the area, students. Got stuck somewhere and it’s too late now to getaway. I’ll be cancelling classes today, Dr. Ralph Anderson wrote. Follow along with the reading. I’ll be with you again as soon as I can.

    That was it. 

    Yet its sparseness, and its recentness in the queue of the announcements, made me think once again that this man had died. One moment he’d been telling them that the fifth edition was just as good as the sixth, but with different page numbers, utterly banal and pedandtic like a good professor, then the next moment he was gone and it was too late to do anything about it. The words “too late” repeated in my head in a different voice, as if warning me about something. Too late, too late. And it’s ten percent off your paper when you hand it in after the due date. 

    I shook my head. The voice was gone. 

    When I turned the online system into one that let me see Dr. Anderson’s notes, I thought there had been a computer glitch. The entire site changed design. The banners were in another color, the logo for the school was different, and so was the font. It seemed like I had hit the WayBack Machine online; I was looking at an early prototype for a class that had been designed in the early era of the accompanying online programs. I went to the announcements page again only to find the date to be the same as before; everything looked strange and archaic, but it was still showing the current year. 

    “Odd,” I said. My apartment echoed the words back. I needed to buy shelves, rather than keep relying on milk crates. I needed furniture to fill up the void, so my words didn’t echo back like that. I chilled. I grabbed the blanket tighter around me. “Very odd.”

    On the content page for the class, everything was still in the old format, but it was all present and accounted for. There were notes and accompanying lessons, just like my department chair Marta had promised, and so I clicked on one of them. A man’s voice, clear and lucid and sounding very much like a dry history professor’s, like the one I’d conjured for him in my head, began to speak.

    “The Black Death only grew in strength because of the 100 Years War, and the Great Famine before it ensuring that most of the inhabitants of the countries hit the worst were already suffering, already struggling to survive.” I skipped ahead in the lecture file, since it was forty minutes long. The recording got a little fuzzy near the end, as if there was static or more echoes. “We will continue this talk on the environmental conditions before we jump into the gory bits. I know it’s disappointing, but it’s a must in order to understand why things have happened as they happen. If we don’t, history will only repeat itself.”

    I went to the next week’s class, clicked play. “I want to talk about the animals that you would see roaming around during this period,” Dr. Anderson continued, his voice slightly more animated than before. “We’re talking about fleas as the means of transmission for the Black Plague, which most of us have enough understanding of biology to grasp how it occurred. Dirty and filth leads to fleas, which carry the bacteria, which keep jumping from animals to humans and back again. Remember that this is not a virus–not like AIDs or the flu we get every year–but a bacteria. That means it’s alive in a different way than a virus, so it thinks in a different way, it has a different ecosystem, of which the fleas were only one part. Remember also that there is no technical cure for this sort of malady. Once you get it, there is no immunization. You can get it again, and again, and again.”

    I skimmed forward again, hoping to find the section on pigs that Cameron had mentioned. Right near the end, mere seconds before the recording cut out, he said, “nocturnal animals became even more aggressive during this era. There were pigs who lived in the plague pits, those mass graves which–“

    Then there was nothing.

    I cursed, finding the content utterly thrilling, and went directly to the next week’s session hoping for some type of ending to the night pigs and their saga. It was the exact same story that Cameron had told me, complete with the same jokes and corny lines; Dr. Ralph Anderson and the former medieval prof in the bar were one in the same. Why didn’t Cameron remember him from this term? It had only been a week, sure, but there had been previous contact. Extended conversations and familiarity. And this was material that Dr. Anderson had been teaching for a long time. Though I only had this one class, and these scattered recordings, each one contained a distinct narrative arc, complete with facts, figures, and characters. Like those night pigs. They stole the show.

    The lecture, I corrected. They informed the lecture. 

    When I tried to find dates for the recordings, there was only the current posting schedule for when these lectures would become relevant; everything was in the future, as if Dr. Anderson had time-travelled into another era digitally, while also living in the past.

    “And being dead in the future,” I said. I shivered. I still could not get the notion that this man was dead and gone from my head. That he was the ghost in the proverbial machine, and that eventually, I’d get to the end of his life like the end of the Plague history in the invisible-to-students lecture queue. 

    I put on the next lecture, then the next, scanning for some sign of madness, of violence, of transgression. But he merely told the entire history of the Black Death, adding in asides that were interesting–did you know about the flagellants, those who whipped themselves in the name of Jesus? did you know about the popes who were, despite common impulse to believe that this illness was a punishment from god, science-forward? and they wanted to find that scientific cure?–and then the course was over.

    “Be sure you submit your final papers in the proper formatting,” he said on one of the last recordings, one that was clearly made in a classroom. I could hear the chairs scraping before he was done lecturing about MLA and deductions for wrong citations. His voice was lost in the mass exodus of a class finally leaving for their exam season. There was chatter, footsteps, and then only breathing and small noises as Ralph cleaned off his desk. The recording was still going, though he was no longer lecturing. There were at least ten more minutes on here. I held my breath as I waited and listened. 

    For what? I still wasn’t entirely sure.

    “Professor Anderson?” a female voice asked. It sounded familiar to me. The chair of my department? She sounded so young, it seemed impossible. Yet when he said, “Hello Marta, how are you?” I knew it was her.

    “I was wondering about the final assignment. Could I possibly wrote on the resurgence of the plague that’s been happening in smaller communities?” She listed off a few recent cases, ones which I had never heard of, but immediately began to Google as I let the recording continue to play. “I wanted to compare the treatment of religion then to the treatment of science now. Or vice versa. I’m still working out the details…”

    He gave her advice, but it was soon cut off by a hand–or fabric, or something heavy-over the speaker of the recorder. I had a flash in my mind in that moment of an answering machine that used little tiny tapes; the type of recording device my mother had used when she completed her night school education, and recorded her lectures, so she could review them later on via the tape deck in her car as she drove to work. As a cassette tape, not as a digital file like this was now; a tape recorder with something you had to physically rewind and then turn around to the other side. I could hear that same rewinding motion as this recording cut off mid-sentence, as Dr. Anderson gave Marta advice on how to make history modern even without bringing up more recent cases.

    “It’s not that I don’t love that idea,” he said. “History repeats itself all the time. It’s where our better ghosts live, and those ghosts can often give us the best lessons. But how can you use the history we know for sure, that we know the definite consequences of from the mid-1300s to make the same point you’d like to make with these modern ghosts? And what is the point you want to make?”

    “I guess–“

    The tape was over. Online, I couldn’t find the exact cases Marla spoke about for the plague, but I did find a general plague counter that the CDC had established. There were roughly seven cases per year in North America alone; it had never gone away, not entirely, not forever. Most of the modern cases were concentrated in third world countries, in places that had a lot of rural areas, and people who were sheepherders were the most common demographic. But there were still cases in cities, still cases amongst the young, those who had never once touched an animal other than a household pet in their entire lives.  

    Another chill passed through my apartment, over my skin, and then down to my ankles where it stayed. Something shoved my feet under the desk, like a cat demanding my attention. 

    Or a night pig.

    Or fleas. 

    I looked under the desk. I saw nothing but my bare feet, nothing but the pens and papers I’d dropped under there, nothing but a desperate need to vacuum. I shoved away from my desk, closing the laptop, and after checking my entire body for bugs and bites, I went to bed just as the sun came up.

    *

    Teaching my first class for Dr. Ralph Anderson was far less dramatic than reading through the files online. The students were older, a bit more organized and invested than your basic first years who still wanted you to be a high school teacher or their parents, but they were still only here because they had to be. They regarded me skeptically for a few minutes, wondering where Professor Anderson had gone, but they eventually came around and accepted my authority. They answered the questions. They engaged in the material. 

    I couldn’t have asked for a better first class.

    When one student, the keener of the group–as there was always one–came over to me at the end of the session, she asked the very same questions I’d seen answered in that week’s announcement from Dr. Anderson. I hadn’t made it visible yet, though, and so I told her to be patient.

    “Okay, will do,” she said, but lingered. 

    “Is there anything else I can help you with, Cassandra?”

    “No. I just… where is Professor. Anderson again? You said he was still away from campus, but I… I’m afraid.”

    “You’re afraid?” I repeated. She nodded, her dark eyes wide. “What are you afraid of?”

    “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

    I was never good at lying–the main reason I was not a high school teacher–and so I nodded. “I don’t know for sure,” I quickly added. “But it’s seeming that way. How did he seem to you the last time you saw him?”

    “Sad,” she said. “Like he wanted to keep teaching, but that… something had run out.”

    “Too late,” I said, repeating the line from his announcement.

    “Yeah, exactly. Like a person who knows they have to pay for a parking meter.”

    “Interesting analogy. Quite poetic.”

    She beamed at the praise, told me she was also taking creative writing that semester. “I should go to that class, actually. I just wanted to know if there was a card I could send, or funeral I should be attending to.”

    “I don’t think so.” I got a sudden image of everyone in medieval England forgoing funerals and merely throwing plague victims into pits, burying them, and hoping for the best. “I will let you know if anything changes.”

    “Thank you.”

    I waited until she was gone from the room before I let out a breath. Of course, I thought. If he’s really died, there will be a funeral. If he’s been part of the school for as long as it seemed from some of these lectures, then there had to be some kind of memorial page. Even if he didn’t have tenure. 

    I used the computer in the classroom to look up his name on the website. Nothing in the news, nothing in the general Google search for funeral homes close by either. I only found more classes he was teaching that semester, more classes that surely had been handed off to other contract workers. One class, on the Crusades and the Inquisition, called The History of Torture from 1000-1500, was starting in under an hour and across campus.

    I figured it was about time to get familiar with yet another era of history. Just to see if, like he suggested, this was where our better ghosts lived.

    *

    A young professor named Dr. Julie Norton had been assigned this class. She was blonde and had great teeth; she smiled a lot as she went through the rather barbaric history leading up to the start of the Crusades to set the tone for the class. The room was filled with even more than the regular registered thirty-five students per class. There was more like fifty, sixty people filling the rows of desks and chairs. Not everyone was student-aged, nor were they decked out like a mature-student, either; they were like me, regular people part of the campus, but who had wandered into the room upon hearing the brutality, and were curious enough to stay around. 

    Though Julie spoke all of the lecture herself, and gestured to a recently made Power-Point slide with images that could only have been scraped together from Google Image Search, I heard Dr. Anderson in her voice. His particular turns of phrases, his macabre humor, all the things I’d listened to obsessively the night before. She must have had a similar experience to me, opening up her course and being rewarded with insight into the mind of a professor as it sprawled through the dead but still somehow living landscape of history.

    “Can you imagine?” Julie said, gesturing to one of the famous torture racks on the board. “Being questioned like this? Having everything you’d ever known ripped from you, and being given nothing but pain to contemplate? Of course you’d give in. You’d say anything to make it stop. Torture never actually works to produce new information. We see this now, with waterboarding and any number of other practices we disguise as advanced interrogation. It’s happened before. It’s happening right now. History always is in the present moment. Nothing new is ever born. It’s always recycled, always already and currently happening.”

    “Sort of like a ghost,” I said, and swore that Julie whispered it as well. 

    The lecture was over–the time on the wall declared it so, along with the ending of the PowerPoint presentation–yet no one left the room. They lingered at the front, wanting to ask Julie a dozen more questions, or they lingered in the back, discussing the topics amongst themselves. Every single student and straggler alike had been whipped into a frenzy.

    I waited. By the time everyone had gone, it was nearly ten at night. I was starving, yet I felt no need for food. I could only see the images of the pigs tearing apart bodies for blood and puss, and then collapsing afterwards on the medieval streets. Or of teeth being removed one by one, in order to extract some sort of truth about the person’s perceived relationship to God, the Devil, or something in between.

    “Hi,” Julie said, her smile worn down from hours of talking. “Can I help you?”

    “Yes. Sort of. I hope. I’m teaching a class for Dr. Anderson as well.”

    “Oh.” Her face went pale, and then she laughed easily. “I suppose that makes sense. He was given a full course load. There are probably many of us out there, teaching his words, reading through the old notes.”

    “So you’ve seen it too, right? You’ve heard it too?”

    “The ghosts?” she asked. 

    “The pigs?” I echoed. “The Night Pigs?”

    “Poltergeist,” she whispered vaguely, this time in her own voice. “German for noisy ghost. History’s poltergeist has many forms, I guess.”

    “It’s pigs for me. Is it teeth for you? The crunch of torture racks?”

    “Yes. No. I have to go.” 

    She gathered all of her items–the laptop, the notes for the PowerPoint, the pens and papers and her cell phone–in a hurried gesture. She apologized meekly, not meeting my eyes as she explained she didn’t want to be too late for a bus. I stood at the front of the lecture hall, everything now empty and hollow. I cursed, heard the echo, and then the same distortion from the last recorded words. An echo, a crunch of bone, a snorting of pigs. 

    This was the place. The last place Dr. Anderson taught.

    I was about to leave when I noticed a Post-It Note under the front desk. I picked it up, knowing that it could have come from anywhere or anyone, but also understanding that it was for me. From this professor to Julie Norton, then to Diego Ruiz, to Andy Watkins, and to Cecilia Jiang, to all the other contract workers who were teaching Dr. Anderson’s work. I would find each one of them in the coming days and nights, sit in on their lectures, and hear them speak in his voice as if possessed. As if history’s ghost could only handle so much; it needed to be spread out to bear the weight. 

    None of those other contract workers wanted to speak with me after their class, either. Each one, when they realized I knew what they knew, had seen what they’d seen, grew pale. Gathered their items. And then ran away, saying they were going to be late, too late, and left me alone in a lecture room with the echoes of madness and references in my ear. 

    The Post-It note listed an address around the corner from the official archives of the city. After turning up so many dead ends, it was the only place I had left to go.

    *

    The building was a three story brick structure, possibly from the late 1970s era of architecture that emphasized sharp lines and a brutalist exterior. Nothing fancy or ornate about it. Sandwiched between a Laundromat and a check cashing place, it looked like the type of cheap rental apartment building that catered to the student crowd of the city. Stairs led up to the front door, and once inside, brass animals flanked a front desk. I thought they were pigs, but when I looked again, I only saw lions. They were the only ornate feature so far that I’d seen, and so my attention was immediately directed to their flowing manes and muted roars.

    “Can I help you?” A woman popped her head around from the front desk. She seemed small, almost elfin. She had a large book in front of her and tapped it. “You’ll need to sign in before going much further.”

    “Of course.” I walked to the desk and grasped a pen in my hand that was on a chain, like at the old banks in my neighborhood. The woman watched me as I signed my name, said hello after reading my name upside down, and then beamed when I seemed impressed.

    “I do it a lot,” she said. “Read upside down. Everyone else is so secretive, I have to find my ways of getting entertainment sitting up here all day. You have a nice name. It means dove. Did you know that?”

    “Oh, no, I didn’t. Neat.” When I closed the book, I caught glimpses of names I was now familiar with–Andy, Diego, Cecilia, and of course, Julie. “What is this place?”

    “A storage area. Nothing more, nothing less. Don’t expect a tour or anything.” She laughed and tucked her body back underneath the large desk and the closed ledger. “I’m just the brass at the front. Everything else here is self-directed.”

    “I can go wherever I want, then?”

    She laughed lightly. “No! But I take it you’re here for Dr. Anderson’s effects? He’s been a popular guy the last little while.”

    “Has he?” I asked, and relished the present-tense of his name. “He’s been here, too?”

    “Always here, in a way. This is where we store his research.”

    “Oh.” My heart sunk. “Isn’t there some sort of privacy consideration? Can I go and look?” 

    “No privacy, not anymore. He’s signed over his material to us. You know, sort of like storage wars, but we didn’t need to win an auction. It’s just… ours now. You’re welcome to look through his items. Here.” She wrote down the number and floor I had to go to in order to access his materials. The Post-It note was exactly the one that had fallen on the floor in the lecture hall. Not that these weren’t ubiquitous in academia, or in business, but I was sure it was from the same pad. The same lot. The same everything. 

    I thanked her again and made my way to the elevators at the back of the building. I still had no idea what I was doing, only that I needed to do this. I still had a class to teach in three hours–not Dr. Anderson’s, but my own–and that knowledge pressed against me like a burden, like a dentist appointment I didn’t want to go to, rather than my passion. What had my dissertation even been about? I wondered. All I could think about now was medieval England, the plague, and the life and now the definite end of Dr. Anderson.

    I stepped out of the elevator on the third floor. A narrow hallway was flanked on either side by large, orange roll up doors which led into storage lockers. I soon located Dr. Anderson’s in the middle, but when I went to open it up, I realized I didn’t have the locker code. 

    “Shoot.” I was about to go downstairs again to talk to the front desk lady, when I impulsively put in the year 1346, the first year of the Black Death. It clicked open. “The worst year to be alive,” I said in Dr. Anderson’s voice, now so much like my own in my ear, as I opened the locker. “The worst year of the worst century. To be remembered forever and ever and ever as a noisy ghost.”

    There was nothing inside the locker.

    Not a damn thing.

    I blinked several times, not believing what I was seeing. I walked inside, right towards the back of the five foot by five foot cell-like space, and scoured the corners, the walls, for something, anything–but there was not even a trace of something left behind, not even another Post-It note with cryptic writing. 

    Had one of the other profs beaten me here? Had they gathered all his items and taken them back to their apartments, where they could tear through the pages of his old dissertation, of his finalized notes, of his course evaluations? I suddenly had the image of my fellow colleagues as night pigs, digging deep in a pit of research, and pulling out rejected paper after rejected paper, eating the second reviewer’s shitty comments, and then keeling over, dying, because everything was infected. I envisioned them tearing apart the papers as bodies torn apart on torture wracks. Extracting harsh reviews like rotten teeth, and then rewriting those papers to include the commenter’s reviews, like a false confession. 

    I let out a low breath. It came back to me as a chill. This room was empty, this room was hollow and contained nothing other than my own paranoid fear, yet I was so determined to find something more. I went to a corner and I felt the soft concrete around it. I wanted to dig. I wanted to burrow into other areas, into other lockers, steal someone else’s shit and call it my treasure for the day. 

    Instead, the door to the storage locker came down with a thwap. I bolted to my feet. I went back to the door, grabbed the handle, and tried to jerk it up.

    Nothing.

    Only orange stared at me, blinding orange against so many muted concrete tones. I banged on the door. 

    “Hello? Hello? Hey!” I called out. “I’m trapped. Help!”

    Nothing. Only more echoes.

    I sunk down on the floor, crossing my legs, and heaving another sigh. When I looked up, I saw a microphone hanging from the ceiling. A microphone and a recorder, the kind my mother had used in my youth and her night school days, the kind that Dr. Anderson had also used. There was nothing else around, nothing else there. Just a recorder, a microphone. 

    “This was where you recorded.” 

    I stood and reached up. I only dragged the bottom of the mic. I got on my tippy-toes. I cursed being so short; Dr. Anderson must have been at least six feet to get this high. I struggled, I jumped, and eventually, the whole thing crashed to the floor of the storage locker.

    I grasped it in my hands, wincing at the possible damage, but nothing was broken. I checked the tape–rewound, ready to go–and then I hit record.

    “Hello,” I said. “I’d like to finish up my lecture series before all of this comes to an end, before it’s too late.”

    I didn’t need my notes anymore, not even for my other classes that I’d been neglecting. It was easy to speak, easy to remember. Almost as if it was all happening again before my eyes. 

    As I spoke, as I told story after bloody story of history and its aftermath, I heard the echoes all around me. Other people, other contract professors and grad students in other storage rooms with different microphones, recording their lessons. Putting down their voices into the machine of the system, so much like a ghost, yet utterly true, utterly living and breathing for the time being. I recorded. They recorded. The school would come and take the tapes when we were done, put them in another version, put them online, and then hand them off to someone else to teach while we continued to speak and speak and speak history’s story, history’s noisy past.

    Then another group of students, curious and devoted and passionate, would find their way here.

    It was easy enough to do. You simply followed what made you happy, followed what made you whole. 

    When I reached the end of my lesson, I stopped the recording. It was dark outside, though there was no light or window to verify what I knew to be true. My phone was dead, not that I could have gotten a signal through the thick walls. I heard nothing around me, not even the echoes of other professors. 

    I waited.

    And when the pigs came, snorting and pounding their hooves against the concrete floors, I was ready for them. Not to fight, but to be devoured as part of history, so others would learn, and not repeat the same mistakes I’d made.

    END

  • 31 for 31: The Architects by Eve Morton

    This is a story so clearly about my workplace.

    I teach at one of the leading Engineering schools in the world: the University of Waterloo. As a sessional, this often means I’m teaching those engineers English for a credit and I often get hostile audiences, ones who don’t really care about English Lit. That’s fine. But one of my favourite stories to tell them is about the structure of campus itself, and how at one point, there was an entire building built to keep people apart from one another, just like they, too, want to be kept apart from English Lit.

    (Hagey Hall, one of the Arts buildings on campus, was built in a strange shape so that protests could not form; it was built after Kent State and this was seen as a positive feature. My old PhD supervisor is the source for this lore, since he was there during the actual construction process).

    I’ve told this story about Hagey Hall so many times that it was inevitable that during my mat leave, when I wouldn’t have to walk its spooky halls, I would write a short story about a similar university that has similar problems with the shape (and capacity) of certain rooms.

    So follow along with this weird and twisty tale.

    The Architects

    By Eve Morton

    The first time I witnessed a room disappear on campus, I was a proctor for an exam.

    When you’re in graduate school, you’ll take whatever work you can get. All students are desperate and I was no exception. When all the qualification you need to be a proctor is the necessary gender in order to escort students to the bathroom during the exam, hover outside to make sure they don’t cheat, and then take them back to the room, it’s an easy gig. Even when it is at seven in the morning, on the first day of winter, and in a part of the school I’d never seen before. Most of the other proctor spots needed men, since they had women profs. This was the only class, for a man named Tom North, who required a woman. 

    I snapped up the opportunity as soon as I could. I received a confirmation from the admin staff, and waited the week until the exam was set. I’d never met Tom North before, but since he was a staple of the old guard on campus, I’d seen his framed face on the wall of the school’s teacher’s lounge. He was a Big Deal back in the day, but he’d since become a dinosaur. In the age of social media and Rate My Professor, he would have barely received tenure. Then again, they don’t do tenure anymore.

    I took the bus on the designated morning while it was still dark. Frost dotted the campus lawns as I walked deeper and deeper into the hulking buildings as they shifted and changed from one generation of architecture to the next. When the campus first opened, there had only been the brick buildings, the yellow-painted welcome center at the front of the campus, and the expansive library. The brick buildings had now become the designated Arts area, where my office was in a basement. The welcome center stayed roughly the same, save for a few updates to plumbing, and the library was now in the center, rather than the far edge, of the campus itself. The rest of the campus had been added on in the last fifty years, thanks to the school’s graduates and reputation becoming more prominent for Math, Sciences, and Engineering. As I walked, the buildings seemed to evolve alongside me. They became sleeker and taller, filled with windows and elongated forms, until it felt as if I had wandered too far from the 1950s brutalism that marked my office into a sci-fi landscape. 

    I was amazed. I’d never needed to go beyond the library before. Even when I was on the top floor of that building, and could see the outstretched campus, I never looked too closely at the architecture. Only the foliage, and the Canadian geese that stayed here all winter long. 

    Though I was acting as a proctor for an Arts class–Milton and his Contemporaries, according to the course calendar–exam season demanded bigger rooms, and so, better buildings were used. I had thought I would be ushered into the gym, but the room I needed to go to was in a building called M2. It was for Maths and Sciences. I located it on the edge of the campus, almost a twenty minute walk from where my own office was, and I arrived with barely ten minutes to spare. I hurried through the glass doors, warming instantly, and walked past large fossils and rock specimens from the local mines encased in class. I wanted to stay and linger, examine what seemed to be a hidden museum inside a university campus, but I was more concerned about making a good impression on Tom North. 

    I located the stairs and headed to the second floor where the exam was. I stepped out and realized it was the third floor. I doubled back into the stairwell, but there was no other door than the one I’d stepped into. Only two twists of the stairs. 

    The second floor was gone. Or at least, I had no access to it in the stairwell. 

    I found the elevator on the ground level. I now only had five minutes until the exam began. In the elevator, I punched the #2 key easily. I stepped out a second later into an area of campus that looked like any other. There were tile floors that scuffed my shoes, thick wooden doors leading into various rooms, and a large foyer.

    An empty foyer. 

    Even though it had been a long time since I’d written an exam myself, there were always early birds outside, hastily cramming until the last minute. Or late stragglers who wandered in from a bus, dazed and disoriented. 

    But there was no one here. Not even footprints or boot tracks from the limited snow outside. There was no evidence at all that anyone but me had been in the building all morning. 

    I walked down one of the two corridors that split off from the foyer. I compared the number of the room I’d been given for the exam against the doors around me. I walked in a semi-circle and came out the other side of the large foyer. 

    There was nothing. No room, and the only way there could have been a room with that number, would have been if the exam could take place here. In the foyer. From the way the stairs and the halls curved, it was the only way to make sense of anything. 

    “Hello?” I called out, thinking of nothing else to do. 

    No answer. 

    I started to panic then, believing this to be my error and my error alone. My phone had no signal in the thick walls, so I stepped out of the building–it probably wasn’t the right one anyway–and called the front desk in the English Department.

    “Hello?” a woman named Margaret answered. “How can I help you?”

    I explained to Margaret the situation. “I’m a proctor for Tom North, but I think I’m lost. I can’t find the room.” I gave her the number. I heard her click the keyboard on the other side. When she was silent a long time, I babbled about receiving a confirmation for the job, and that though I’d never met Professor North before, I didn’t want to leave him with a bad impression. “If I’m late, it’s one thing. But I don’t want to make it so his students suffer, either.”

    More clicks. Soft breathing from the other side. “This is odd. Says the exam was supposed to be in the Arts department.” She listed a number close to my office. 

    “What? I was never told. I’ll head right over.”

    “Then he cancelled it,” Margaret added, her voice thin. “I’m so sorry. I guess no one got around to telling you. It’s the end of the year, and–“

    “Oh. Oh.” I let out a breath. It was a mistake. No one’s fault. When Margaret assured me that I’d still be paid for my time, all three hours the exam was supposed to go on, I really had nothing to be mad about. 

    “Again, we’re sorry,” Margaret said. “Enjoy your day–and your holidays!”

    I spent the rest of the morning in the strange building, looking at the fossils and the rock specimens I’d never seen before. But soon would see, nearly every day, in time.

    *

    The second time a room disappeared on campus, I nearly missed it because it wasn’t a room at all. It was a hallway that suddenly disappeared, and nearly left me stranded in my office during a winter storm. 

    A year had passed since the incident with Tom North. I moved on from the preliminary stages of my PhD, passed the classes and the comprehensive exams, and was now in my writing mode. Tom North had retired shortly after the proctor mix-up, and I’d heard through the mailroom gossip circle that he’d died. Not uncommon for professors of his generation. It was one of the main issues–spoken about in hushed, polite tones, of course–that people in the department reminded me of when I selected Maurice Callahan as my own supervisor. He was of Tom North’s generation, had started the PhD department when he first began teaching at the university, and was already in his mid-seventies. He’d had no health problems so far, but that seemed to be a strike against him. It would only be a matter of time. 

    I liked Maury, though, as he wanted to be called. He was funny. He laughed at my jokes. And there was a certain allure to the fact that he was almost as old as the school itself. He’d watched the campus unfold into the strange monolith that it was now. 

    “It had a completely different reputation ten, twenty years ago,” he told me during one of our monthly supervisory meetings. “It was an Arts school, through and through. You know the sculpture that’s just outside Hubert Hall?”

    I nodded. The sculpture was off a flat man, as if he’d been steamrolled, throwing a ball in the air. 

    “It’s not a ball. It’s a shot-put. It was supposed to be a symbol for the sports team–the flames–and a symbol for Prometheus stealing fire.”

    “Supposed to?”

    “Yes, well, I think he sort of loses his context now. The art may stay, but meanings change. And well, it feels like we’re strictly in the punishment stage of Prometheus’s life, getting our livers plucked out.”

    I laughed. I could see–and sympathize with–his disdain for the lack of funding the Arts was now receiving. “That’s hindsight for you, I guess.”

    “That’s the thing,” Maury said. “Prometheus means foresight. We should have seen this coming before, not after, our funding was gutted. Hindsight was Prometheus’s brother, Epimetheus.”

    “I don’t know that story,” I said, cheeks blushing. I made a note to look it up, but Maury told it to me anyway.

    “He was the twin of Prometheus, and together they were tasked with giving animals traits. But since Epimetheus lacks foresight like Prometheus, he didn’t give anything to man. He was a fool, in short, which then led his brother to steal fire and stand trial for that crime. Personally, I think we undervalue Epimetheus. He can be the fool, sure, but he’s also the kind one. There is no ulterior motive here. He’s pure materialism, which is to say, thought comes afterwards. He makes something. Then he tells us about it.” Maury laughed. “I think a lot of PhD students can benefit from that attitude. Not you, of course.” He gave me a sly smile. “But I see many students tell me what they’re going to write, and then never do it. Just write the damn thing, you know? Then you can steal fire somewhere else. Now, let’s get back to your project.”

    It was only three days after that conversation when I became stuck in my office. The hallway that I’d taken to get there had simply disappeared. There were two main stairwells to gain entry to the basement of the building: one was the main entrance, flanked by glass doors and school colors, and then there was the back exit that was barely noticeable, especially in winter, when snow was piled close to the doorway. It was known as the “smoker’s exit” since those piles of snow often turned gray in no time with cigarette butts and ash. 

    I liked using the smoker’s doorway. It made coming and going to my office feel clandestine, and since students always seemed to recognize me on campus and want to discuss their grades, being covert was necessary. I’d taken that exit as an entrance like I always did, walked by the bathrooms and the information area, and then settled into my office, next to many other PhD offices. An hour, maybe two, had passed. When I was ready to leave, I wanted to use the bathroom.

    But they were gone. The entire information center and its waiting room was gone. There was only a blank wall, nothing hanging on it, where it had once been. 

    “I don’t…” I didn’t finish my sentence because I heard it echo. I placed a hand against the wall that I swore had never been there. It was solid. I pressed my ear against it. I swore I could hear something–murmuring, chattering–but it could have been my own heartbeat. I tried to follow the wall, to see if it would lead me somewhere else, but it was truly a dead end. Just a wall where there had once been a way out. 

    I turned the other direction, in search of the elevator. That was the only other way I knew of getting to the front exit. My heart did not stop pounding in my chest until I stepped out on the first floor, saw the blazing sunlight through the glass doors, and touched them. They were real. They let me leave. 

    I was too spooked to go around back, where the smokers left their cigarettes, to check if that door was still there. By the time I did, a week and a half later, nothing had changed. 

    The hallway was back where it had been. There was a smoker’s exit again. 

    But a clear sign had now been posted in red, angry letters NO SMOKING WITHIN 9M OF THE BUILDING. The janitorial staff, and a handful of grad students, were now in obeisance of that law, and stood nine meters back. I wanted to go over and join them, take up smoking simply to ask if they had been there last week, and if so, did they get trapped outside, unable to get back in? When had the hallway come back? What the hell had happened?

    But I didn’t say a thing to them. 

    I saw Maurice instead. 

    *

    “Now that’s interesting,” he said, after I’d spilled the incident about the hallway and the previous one a year ago with Tom North’s nonexistent exam room. “You should write a story about that.”

    “I don’t want to,” I said. Maurice often worked under the premise that nearly everyone obtaining an English Literature PhD wanted to be a writer in some way. He did when he was young, though, and some of the other grad students also harbored literary ambitions–but I just wanted to understand things. Including the strange campus. “I just want to know that I can trust the campus maps, and trust where I think I’m going.”

    “You can trust the maps,” Maurice said. “Especially the online ones. They update more frequently.”

    “So you’re telling me that the online map would have reflected that sudden change in my office? Even if it was only for an hour or a week?”

    “I don’t know. I don’t use it myself.”

    “How do you get around?” I asked him. He’d told me on several occasions that he walked everywhere, including to and from the campus since his house was merely a block away. It kept him young, he joked. But maybe it also kept him with working knowledge of a place that I was starting to realize I could never fully pin down or figure out. 

    “On foot,” he answered obviously.

    “But how do you remember where to go?”

    “I’ve been here a long time, remember. I was here when the Dean gave the order to build most of the newer parts of campus. I was even on some committees when they were electing to reshape some of this building, too.”

    “They’ve renovated Hubert Hall?” I looked around the thick brick walls of his office, so much like mine in the basement. The architecture itself was so dense cell phones never worked. Even some of the computers that had been installed didn’t get wifi and had to rely on Ethernet cables. “Hard to tell.”

    “I know, but they did. And it was a serious endeavor and expense, hence the committee. It was in the 1960s,” he began, getting somewhat of a dreamy quality to his voice. “I won’t bore you with too many details, because I could write a book about this myself.”

    “Maybe you should.”

    “Maybe. But I think it’s been done. Either way, this meeting was about the foyer. They didn’t want a large one for students to congregate inside. In effect, they wanted to avoid protesting. There was a lot of uproar about Kent State, with good reason, and so when I say that the staff didn’t want protestors, don’t think they were regressive. They merely wanted to save student lives. So they decided to not have a large foyer, and extend what they needed to do through many hallways instead.”

    “Really? Like where my office is?”

    “Yes. That’s why I thought it was interesting that a hallway disappeared. Almost like the school is fighting back, protesting itself.”

    I didn’t want to believe him, yet I could feel it in my bones that he was right. “What about the other building?” I asked a moment later. “The one where Tom North’s exam should have happened, but didn’t? M2, Mathematics. That’s a newer building, right?”

    “It is. But North–oh, he hated that area.”

    “Hard not to,” I said then quickly added, “given the history between arts and sciences and funding. But it was really pretty. There were fossils there. It was nice.”

    “Yes, I’ve seen those myself. The architect is a bit better than this brutalism. At least phones work.” 

    “Sometimes,” I added. “Not that morning with me.”

    “Huh.” He shrugged, and then ran his hand over his beard. “From what I recall, though, the architect who designed those buildings was related to the first one who did Hubert Hall, version 1.0.”

    “Including the hallways?”

    “I think so. They were brothers?” Maury shook his head. “No, couldn’t have been with the generational difference, especially in styles. Must have been father and son, or something like that. I think I remember the surnames being similar. Potter or Pohle or something like that. So yeah, father and son.” When he noticed me take a note, he added with a wry smile, “be sure to double-check my information, of course. I’m not exactly as much of a library as I used to be.”

    I told him I would. Then I remembered the library. “What about that?”

    “What about the library? It’s been here as long as I can remember.”

    “Right. Who built it? Was it the father or the son?”

    “That I don’t know, but I would assume the father. It hasn’t been renovated, though, aside from the tech updates. So maybe it’s the only place on campus that will stay still.”

    “Maybe.” I wrote down ‘Library’ and underlined it several times. Then, as easily and as quickly as we spoke about the campus, we moved onto my PhD research. My dissertation was almost complete, and when it was, my time at this school would be coming to an end. 

    *

    The third time the campus changed shape for me, I was prepared. 

    I was teaching a class in the Environmental Sciences building. It was closer to the center of campus, having been one of the first buildings in the expansion of the early 1990s. Everyone on campus back then had welcomed the addition. It was the early days of environmental awareness at a popular cultural level; the legwork in critical Sciences had already been done by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the 1960s, and so, having a building on an already liberal and progressive campus devoted to the green movement was easy to understand and push through budgetary approval. 

    It was also easy to make the building stunning. Filled with high glass windows and large, spacious foyers, there was clearly no fear of protestors here. Entirely one side of the foyer walls was covered in a make-shirt trellis, complete with waterfall that allowed whatever greenery on the trellis to bloom and grow and thrive. The staircase into the upper levels was open and allowed for complete viewing of the green wall. I loved looking at it up close–but those stairs gave me vertigo. I often took the elevators to my class on the third floor, or I took the back stairwell when there was a line-up for the elevator. 

    I was halfway through the spring semester when I noticed the contours of the building change. I took the stairwell to the third floor, but the doorway out read the second. I continued walking and added another flight, but came out at the fourth floor. 

    The third floor had disappeared. 

    I walked down to the building’s ground level and started again. The elevators took me to the third floor, but when I walked out, it was still the second. That was where all the offices, rather than classrooms, were so it was easy to recognize. I doubled back once again and stood in the foyer. Some of my students had already started to arrive, and seeing me, went over to say hello. 

    “Are you all right?” a girl named Deidre asked me. “You look a little pale, if you don’t mind me saying.”

    I considered lying for a moment, saying I was sick, and cancelling the class. How could I get to the class if the floor didn’t seem to exist? But when I saw Shawn, another student of mine, take the free-floating stairs next to the green wall, and make it to the third floor without doubling back, I realized there was only one way to the room. 

    “I’m fine,” I told Deidre. “But will you walk with me? I don’t quite like heights.”

    Deidre was one of those eager to please students, so she took me up on my offer without protest. I made a mental note to give her 100 for participation for the next six weeks, until this class was done, since I knew I’d be relying on her far more. We found the room together, as easy as pie, except that the nagging feeling of the floor disappearing again bothered me. 

    We were in the middle of Marilyn Robinson’s Gilead this week, a text about an absent father writing to his son who will not remember him, and it felt as if the campus was mocking me in some way. Or aligning in the best way possible. From one of the large glass windows in the room, as I read off the passage I wanted my students to analyze, I saw the library’s ornate edifice and tall, imposing structure. 

    The library, where nothing seemed to change. The library, where from its top-most floor, all of the campus could be visible. 

    I quickly finished my class, with ten minutes to spare, and dismissed them. Deidre stayed behind. “Do you need help getting down the stairs?”

    “No thank you,” I told her. “Going down is always easier than going up.”

    She nodded, and gave a silent promise to be there the next week. I knew it would not be a problem, though. The campus was going to right itself, even if I had to be the mediator between father and son. 

    *

    My visits to the library, at first, were uneventful. I went to the top floor, studied the landscape, but still came back with all I’d seen before: a lot of nice greenery, a campus split in two, and those ever-present geese. I wandered through the stacks, trying to find all I could about the architects who built the campus, but only came up with names, the thinnest of biographies, and blueprints. Frederick and Philip Pohle. Father and son, much like Maury had said, and with different design schools influencing their work. 

    When Frederick had died, Philip took over his business, but left many clients unhappy with his attempts to become the Canadian Frank Lloyd Wright. He didn’t have enough ambition to take on that kind of legacy, however, or the proper work ethic, so most of his designs remained on paper. The only places that came to fruition were ones he inherited from his father: the campus extension, a renovated downtown building that I had never liked, and a hospital a town over that had since been torn down. Philip had no children of his own, and so the family business died with him. 

    I made photocopies of all the blueprints I could find, giving special attention to the campus extensions. I figured I could take those, at the very least, to Maury who might be able to help me piece the mystery together–but I soon realized the maps fit over one another. Not as a mere expansion of the campus, but as another layer over top. I took the photocopies out of the tray and made sure that what I’d seen in a glimpse could truly fit. Once I found the library on the blueprints, and used it as the centering anchor it was, the campuses aligned. It was perfect. They weren’t added on in a spatial way, but stacked up in geological time. 

    “Like those fossils,” I said aloud. The library was so quiet my voice, though a whisper, seemed to be a roar. Everyone in the study carrels had on headphones, so no one noticed. But I tip-toed around like a mouse, suddenly afraid that the secret was out. 

    After asking a librarian for tracing paper, I went into a study area and laid out the maps on top of one another. I traced around them, wondering if I could see the way in which floors and hallways had disappeared on me. I could make the maps work in some instances, but not in others. 

    Baffled, I logged into some of the online accounts for the school’s student body and found a message board. A handful of people described the campus as the most difficult to navigate they’d ever come across. The room I needed seemed to disappear, one person wrote, peaking my attention. It sounds crazy, but that’s what happened. I didn’t find it until a week later.

    I started to link together online reports with my own experiences. Soon enough, when I flipped over the blueprint I’d traced, so it was now a mirror image on top of the older campus, the coordinates began to make sense. Father and son had designed the exact same building, but always in opposition. 

    So how to make them stop feuding, even after death? I wondered about this for a long time. It was only as the semester wore on, and Maury began to get more persistent about my dissertation, that I remembered his words of foresight and hindsight. 

    Don’t be like Prometheus, he wrote to me in an email. You don’t want to be repeating this year over and over, even if it seems like fun. You gotta move on and finish that degree.

    But what about hindsight? I asked him in return. What if I realize now that I like the campus, and want to stay?

    He didn’t answer me for a couple days. In the interim, I’d found the sole place of unbalance in my maps of the father and son campus. While the Arts campus had its own figure of Prometheus with a shot-put/fireball, the Science side of campus did not have such a figure. Only a blank area, where someone had put a trash can and where squirrels and geese congregated. 

    We can talk about alternative plans at your next meeting, Maury wrote back. It’s usually better to teach at a different school. Shows depth. But if you really want to stay, we can figure out a way to make it work.

    I will be teaching at a different school, I thought. I’d been stuck on the father’s side of campus until that proctor exam. Frederick Pohle may have wanted me to, like the olden ways of graduate school, leave and set about on my own–but his son Philip had other plans. He was a bit more dynamic and interesting, if only on paper. He just needed more ambition and work ethic, something I knew I had in droves. If he only had his own monument to hindsight, maybe his father could be proud. 

    Then, after that, maybe the fighting could stop.

    *

    When I met with Maury a week later, I told him of my progress. He didn’t seem that surprised that my dissertation, once about the genre known as the campus novel and the subsequent works of Don DeLillo, had now become about the father and son feud that seemed to stretch on for generations in the ever-shifting landscape. 

    “I told you,” he said after I’d explained it all, including the pitch to get another statue to keep the men happy, “you should be a writer.”

    “Fine. Yes, sure, this is what I’ll write my dissertation about, and it will help me get a job here. On Philip’s campus, though. It’ll be different that way.”

    Maury didn’t say anything for a long time. He picked up the maps I’d given him, and the notes, including my sketch for the matching statue of Epimetheus on the other side. He was a flattened monument like the previous one on the other side, only he held a hammer in his hand rather than a shot-put/flame. 

    “I wanted the hammer to symbolize materialism,” I told Maury in the silence. “The fact that thought here comes after form, after the hammer blow. And I–“

    “It’ll take a lot of funding to get this to go through,” he said, cutting me off. It was not mean, only a fact. 

    “That’s fine. I can help. I don’t know how to fund beyond a bake sale, though.”

    Maury smiled. “You gotta learn grant writing soon. It’ll be a great part of your service record. And if you can pull off this statue, especially as a Canadian historical site, while also writing your dissertation, well, then, you’ll be a shoe-in as a prof here.”

    “Really?”

    “Yes. Don’t expect tenure, though,” he added quickly. “No one gets that anymore.”

    I didn’t want tenure. I just wanted to teach in that building with the fossils. I wanted to see a statue of a flattened man, holding a hammer like Epimetheus, and melding the work of father and son into one.

    *

    A year, then two, went by. My dissertation passed with few revisions and I turned it into a book about the father and son team. I applied for a job teaching Writing and Communication to the Science and Math students, and was accepted after three rounds of interviews. Not with tenure, of course, but with a three-year contract. 

    My office is now in the M2 building, and overlooks the statue of Epimetheus on the campus. 

    Though sometimes, when I walk the same stairs that lead to the second floor, it disappears, I now know how to get it back. I call out for father and son to behave, to develop some hindsight. 

    Then I take the elevator. 

    It all sorts itself out in the end. 

    When the campus is truly temperamental, and foresight or hindsight get us nowhere, then I cancel the class I need to teach entirely. I tell them to go to the library instead, because that’s where I’ll be. I make sure I am on the top floor, looking down on both time and space, and generations of a family history at once. I look out at all that I’ve inherited, all that I can claim as my own, with the right map to understand where to go next.

    When a student shows up, which sometimes happens and sometimes not, I show them the statues of Prometheus and Epimetheus, and they learn, for at least an hour, how to stay in one place. 

    END