NEW YORK CITY
Monday, 9 October

David Hamilton loosened his tie as the last of the students left
the lecture hall, her short hair gelled into spikes of purple and lime
green. Nice ass but dumb as dryer lint.

The air in the room was heavy, hot and still. He swiveled his
chair around toward the oversized clock on the back wall. Beneath
it, a quotation from Berlioz had long been altered to reflect his
current mood: ‘Time is a great teacher, but fortunately it kills all its
pupils’. That no one had taken responsibility for the defacing was
less telling than the fact that not a single student had commented
on it, which was precisely the point.

And the faculty was even more obtuse. The moment at which
his fellow educators had crossed the line from chronically boring to
terminally dull was impossible to pinpoint, but it roughly coincided
with a change in his musical taste from Bono to Samuel Barber. It
was not merely their droning academic paranoia that provoked his
antagonism, but the righteous indignation with which they executed
it. Overkill. A sure sign that they were all in deep shit.

If a waning interest in the Humanities was common knowledge,
the reverse was true of the reasons. Theories abounded daily but
only one thing was certain: departmental cutbacks were probable, a
situation which evoked the same degree of glee as a case of crabs
in a sorority house. Bottom line, they didn’t get it.

He got it. The cyber generation had awakened to the fact
that pre-Renaissance Philosophy and Ptolemaic history had little
relevance in a world obsessed with outsourcing, corporate greed
and all things mundane. Retrospection could no longer provide
the precedents on which to build a future. There simply were no
precedents for the new millennium. The world was in freefall.
As for him, he was tired of fighting for the intellectual
souls of his students. If they preferred Beavis & Butthead to
Beowulf, so be it. He could go with the flow. He supposed there
were days when the rewards were sufficient for him to put his
work in perspective, but they were getting fewer and farther
between. At age forty-six, he was losing his battle with the law
of diminishing returns.

He didn’t know how Martin did it. Surviving almost forty
years of university life was one thing. That he had maintained
his commitment and sense of humor bordered on sacrilege.
Hamilton smiled, his fi rst of the day. He could forgive his
father-in-law almost anything, including his insistence on their
Sunday night bacchanals of backgammon and brandy stingers.
Not, they concluded one drunken evening, the worst way to end
the week.

Ex-father-in-law, he reminded himself. Five years ago,
Jennifer had skedaddled out of both their lives with just the
clothes on her back and enough grievances to make several
therapists salivate. But it was okay. Really. He was happy for
her. She had a new life and a gazillionaire for a husband. He
had Columbia. The Big C.

Hamilton popped two aspirin into his mouth, drained the last
of his cold coffee and lobbed the styrofoam cup in the direction of
the wastebasket.

A single dark figure grinned at him from the door. “Man you ever
think of going into another line of work?”

“Hourly. What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be out pedaling
this prestigious paragon of profundity?”

“Later. Right now you’re buying me lunch.”

“Why?”

“Because after that I’m hightailin’ it to your old alma mata. Got me
an audience with a whole messa white kids at Darien High School.”
Tim Hayes flashed a comic Al Jolson smile. “Dey gonna love me ou’ deah.”

“Keep that up and they’ll lynch you out there.”

It was one of their favorite haunts, a dark Second Avenue pub
distinguished by its large Bloody Marys and absence of other
Columbia staff.

After his first drink, Hamilton’s mood had mellowed. By the time
his cheeseburger arrived, he was severely depressed.

“My life sucks.”

Hayes hailed a passing waitress. “Check, please.”

Hamilton waved her off.

“It’s Monday, Dave. Your life sucks every Monday. By Friday,
you’re a barrel of laughs.”

“I need to make some changes.”

“Good. You can start by dating someone older than your car.”

“She was almost thirty with a Ph.D. in Anthropology!”

“Dave, she was twenty-eight and she thought James Dean gave
up his film career to work for Richard Nixon.”

“That’s exactly my point. We’re teaching them but we’re not
educating them.” Hamilton picked up a French fry. “Doesn’t it
bother you that we’re not really preparing these kids for the
real world? This group in Darien, they think they’re going to get
through college, land a cushy job with a big office and be set for
life. It ain’t gonna happen. They’re going to work their asses off
until their jobs are outsourced by some greedy prick with a larger
office and wind up on Prozac by the time they’re fifty. Okay, some
of them will tough it out through Med School or Law School and
maybe, just maybe, they’ll wind up back in Fairfield County up to
their eyeballs in debt.”

Hayes had stopped eating. “Remind me again why I hang out
with you.”

“What are the alternatives? Academia? That’s another joke.
We’re preparing our grad students for what? A marketplace of
shrinking demand. Think about it. A majority of them will fi nd
themselves driving taxicabs or pursuing careers in food service
while they wait for a teaching position. The lucky ones can look
forward to alcoholism and depression, eventual tenure and death.
Or retirement, then alcoholism, depression and death.”

“Yo Dave, you teach Literature not Sociology. I’m a counselor,
not a crusader. We do the best we can. I come from a place that’s
a little short on alternatives, remember? Education isn’t just one
answer, it’s the only answer.”

Hamilton sat back. “I get the message.” He jumped as his
cellphone beeped, alerting him that he had missed a call. Ten
minutes later the cellphone lay on the table between them like a
plague culture.

“Dave, this is silly. Go outside and call her back. It’s what,
eight-thirty in Brussels?” Hayes stirred his coffee and looked at his
watch. “How long since you’ve heard from her?”

“Four years maybe. Her quote social secretary unquote sent me
a wedding invitation by mistake. Jennifer was calling to apologize for
the faux pas. Actually, I think she was scared shitless I’d show up.”

“How’d she sound?”

“Frosty. But I think she’d already received my gift.”

“You sent them a wedding gift.”

“I did. A sterling silver butter dish from Bloomies. Set me back
a couple of bucks.” Hayes raised an eyebrow.

“Plus another twenty or so for the butter.”

Hamilton drove straight home. By the time he left the parking garage
and walked the two blocks to his 86th Street apartment, panic had
seized him.

Downing another three aspirins, he felt dizzy and grabbed the
bathroom sink for support. When it passed, he lifted his head and
studied the man opposite him with wary detachment. He was still
more blond than gray. That was good. But there were defi nitely
a few more frown lines and that was bad. Settling for a draw, he
doused the light.

The rain that had begun as a light shower was coming down
hard as he flopped on the sofa and reached for the phone. Minutes
later, he replaced the receiver, his anxiety giving way to a mixture
of relief and anger. Overexposure to alcohol and old emotions had
taken their toll. He closed his eyes. Three hours later he awoke to
an incessant ringing. He relaxed when he heard the voice.

Tim was on his cellphone. “Just in case you’ve decided to take
the gas and are preparing your list of bequests, kindly refrain from
leaving me your Yanni CD collection. We ain’t that good of friends.”

“Red alert off. I tried her a couple of hours ago and she wasn’t
home. Obviously she isn’t waiting breathlessly by the phone.”

“Dave, call Martin. Maybe he knows what this is about.”

“My guess is he doesn’t. Until I get through to her, I’m not ruining
his evening too.” The line went dead and Hamilton hung up.

For the first time in months, he sat back and surveyed the
chrome and leather hell he called home. Newly and reluctantly
freed from his matrimonial bonds, he’d replaced the charming
vestiges of his ten-year marriage with what he deemed suitable
for a sophisticated Professor-about-town. No one seemed to
appreciate the fact that it had taken weeks of careful planning to
turn their once comfy apartment into a DMV waiting room. That
he’d resisted the notion of a lava lamp was a point in his favor.

The same could not be said of the area rug, a tangled field of
fur-like substance called flokati. The night he brought it home
he’d dreamed of a warehouse somewhere in Bayonne where
captured Yeti were being harvested for their pelts. To his regret,
the intervening years had done little to enhance the overall effect,
especially the steady infusion of Car & Driver magazines spilling
forth from a teetering étagère. He’d actually broken two hard and
fast rules on that one: never to take a date shopping and never
to purchase something he couldn’t spell.

His eyes eventually came to rest on the desk and his manuscript,
another joke. He’d started it in grad school but so far his sole claim
to fame was for having the longest continuous case of writer’s block
ever recorded. To date, the only people who had profited from
his efforts were those writers who made a career of telling other
writers how to write. Happily, there were parts of it he liked very
much and still other parts that withstood two decades of changing
mores. Less encouraging was that, as an action thriller, it lacked
only thrills and action before its vaulted place in mainstream fiction
could be ensured. On his way out of the room, he picked it up and
dumped it in the trash can. Who was he kidding?
The phone rang as he stepped from the shower. Tempted to
ignore it, he answered it on the third ring.

The male voice on the other end of the line, while heavily
accented, came through loud and clear. “Professor Hamilton?”

“This is David Hamilton.”

“I am sorry to disturb you, Professor, but we have been trying
to contact you all day. I am calling on behalf of Madame Jennifer
Merville. There has been an accident.”