Straight Man

“You have a rotten one.”

CHAPTER
6
    The student center is normally a short walk, now a somewhat longer one, thanks to the massive excavation out of which will grow, this summer, the new College of Technical Careers building. Ground-breaking ceremonies were scheduled earlier in the month until one of the dignitaries, our local congressman, waving enthusiastically to imaginary constituents for the benefit of TV cameras, missed the first step getting off his charter plane and broke his ankle on the second, making it necessary to conduct the ground-breaking ceremonies later this afternoon, after the excavation has been dug. They’ll have to find a camera angle for that first symbolic shovelful of earth that does not include the enormous pit.
    In truth, this hole fills me with misgivings, and not because a Pennsylvania congressman has fallen in the line of duty trying to dedicate it. Perhaps, I tell myself, it’s that a surprise—a replica of my own house—grew out of the last such excavation I inspected. Seeing this new hole suggests that more surprises may be in store for me. On theother hand, all logic dictates that I should be reassured by this hole in the ground. It was competed for by the other campuses in the university system and awarded to ours, a sign of favor in these straitened academic times. Soon concrete footers will be poured and walls will climb out of the hole, and the summer air will be full of the sound of jackhammers and drills, the raised voices of men with real, urgent information to communicate (“Watch your fucking head there!”) as steel girders swing through the dusty air.
    All of this will proceed quite naturally from this still undedicated but undeniable hole in the ground, and what it all suggests is that these rumors about an impending purge of our professorial ranks simply cannot be true. Even university administrators are not foolish enough to spend millions on a new facility in the same year they intend to fire tenured faculty and claim financial hardship as justification. Unless they have no intention of building anything here. Unless the faculty are going to be invited to drink Jim Jones Kool-Aid after the donkey basketball game and then buried in a mass grave. This scenario also accounts for the facts as we know them, and although I can hear William of Occam snickering across the centuries, the sound does not dispel my misgivings. Right this instant, the hole does more closely resemble a mass grave site for dull-witted faculty than a new, state-of-the-art, technical careers center, and I can’t help offering up a nervous smile at the idea that the administration might put the lot of us so beyond further grievance with one deft, efficient stroke.
    Huddled on the far side of the campus pond, where the tall trees offer better protection from the wind, are thirty or forty ducks and geese. There was a time when these birds migrated, but anymore they’re year-round residents, tenured and content, squatting motionless on the bank, like abandoned decoys, subsisting on popcorn and other student junk food, too fat to fly and, as the saying goes, too ugly to love.
    They are easily faked out, too, as if they’ve been too long separated from their better instincts, too often seduced by baser ones. Their heads rotate on their otherwise motionless bodies, and when I take my hands out of my pockets and make a flicking motion, tossing imaginary popcorn along the bank, the birds start toward me, trailing V’s on theplacid surface of the pond. I’d like to think they know better, that they are capable of perceiving from across the pond that I have nothing for them. I’ve been told by hunters that ducks are smart, that they have remarkable vision, that from high in the sky they can detect subtle movements on the ground, see the whites of hunters’ eyes.
    If true, these particular ducks are the village idiots of their species, waddling up out of the water and quacking around on the brown grass in search of what I’ve pretended to throw them. They can see it isn’t there, but they search for it anyway. Their protests reach a remarkable crescendo. Among the mallards are three tough-looking white geese, and the tallest and most elegant of these comes over and hisses at me, its bill wide open, its dark, toothless maw surprisingly menacing. Its white breast is dappled with smatterings of rust color, which remind me of the blood I sneezed the length of the seminar table yesterday afternoon.