12
Cornelius couldn’t imagine sleeping under the roof where his father died, so instead he moved into a cheap motel called The Starlight. The Arbuckle had a deal there for out-of-town visitors who came in for the few festivals the theater hosted.
CC spent the next week reading death notices from his birth year. The Summers family — mother, father and newborn son Anthony — had died in a car crash outside Philadelphia.
Dead-alive Anthony Summers applied for a social security number at the age of eighteen. He’d attended school in Queens then CCNY for one semester. Tony’s essays, forged grades and test scores (taken after graduation) were good enough for a transfer to Yale.
At the end of his junior year Tony had his first name legally changed to John, after Violet’s cuckold husband, and his last name to Woman in homage to Detective Margolis making him say, “I am your woman.”
He kept using the name Anthony Summers until after entering graduate school at Harvard.
He was a new man in a new world ready to live life freely and without consequence.
Part One
Professor Woman
1
Far out in the high desert, fifty miles or so from Phoenix, stands a very large and circular five-story structure, the walls of which are plated with tile-like strips of white marble and broad panes of dark blue glass; its round, domed, and transparent roof is fashioned from thick, green-tinted, unbreakable polymer. This is Prometheus Hall, the main academic building of the New University of the Southwest.
There are twelve equally spaced double doors around Prometheus; opposite pairs of these doors open onto hallways that cut diagonally across the first floor of the building. Each of these pathways is paved with tiles of one of six colors: the three primary hues and their secondary complements. The tiled paths meet in and cross the Great Rotunda at the center of the huge building. This central chamber is the hollow heart of the desert university: where students, faculty, staff and visitors are welcome to stop and sit on one of eighty-six white marble benches — to read, contemplate or discuss, or merely to rest.
The four upper floors each consist of twelve equally sized pie-shaped classrooms. These forty-eight lecture halls are only eleven feet wide at the entrance but broaden to four times that width at the blue glass windows that look out over the Arizona desert.
Professor John Woman arrived at Prometheus fifteen minutes before one o’clock on the first Tuesday in September. He entered the building through Door Eleven, progressed down North Violet Lane to the periphery of the Great Rotunda where he ascended the zigzagging north stairwell to the fifth floor. He stopped, leaning his back against the triple-barred chrome rail overlooking the rotunda. There he watched as students went through the broad red-rimmed doorway of Lecture Hall Two.
The young associate professor stood exactly six feet tall with thick, curly brown hair; medium-brown skin; and generous, friendly features. Despite his slender build he gave the impression of quiet physical strength.
Professor Woman studied the young people entering his classroom. Some carried briefcases while others lugged big purses, shoulder bags, and backpacks. Three students carried nothing at all, just walked through the door to sit and listen, maybe trying to figure out whether or not to drop John’s challenging INTRODUCTION TO DECONSTRUCTIONIST HISTORICAL DEVICES. If they weren’t history majors, they might switch to a pottery class or Felton Malreaux’s POETRY APPRECIATION. History majors might transfer to Gregory Tracer’s HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR or Annette Eubanks’s FEMINIST OR REVISIONIST HISTORY?
John checked his father’s Timex wristwatch at one minute to one. He took a deep breath and strode toward Lecture Hall Two feeling both excitement and confidence.
He stopped at the doorway, blocked by a willowy young woman with fairly short auburn hair. Motionless at the threshold she seemed to be lost, as if maybe this was the wrong class. Her flimsy gold jacket was more like a shirt with sleeves that didn’t quite achieve the wrists. Likewise the legs of her turquoise-colored trousers hovered a few inches above the ankles. She wore straw sandals and the bag slung across her shoulder was white Naugahyde marked by a solitary blue ink spot, a few abrasions and a black skid-mark that ran along the bottom.
The young woman was tall but John was taller. Over her shoulder he could see the twenty or so students who had staked out the first three rows of the classroom that could have easily seated two hundred.
“Excuse me,” John said.
The young woman gasped and turned. While not pretty, she was, at least to his eye, handsome in the extreme. With butterscotch skin, a strong jaw and tawny eyes the crystalline hue of topaz marbles; she had the long fingers of a pianist. The eyes slanted up just a bit. Her thick hair was crinkled.
“Sorry,” she said taking half a step to the side. “You trying to get in?”
“Yes I am,” John said with a smile.
“You’re taking this class too?”
He shrugged, tilting his head to the side. It was no surprise the undergraduate hadn’t identified him as a professor. He was only a few years past thirty. His Asian-cut, soft-milled black cotton jacket and loose coal gray trousers were not professorial — neither was his slightly faded scarlet T-shirt.
“I heard it was hard,” the young woman said, anxiety eeling its way across her lips.
“New ideas seem hard at first,” he said, “but challenge is why we’re here.”
With that John crossed the red doorsill and went to the semitransparent emerald green polymer lectern at the front of the class. Any talking that had been going on petered out and, a few seconds later, the uncertain young woman made her way to a seat in the third row.
Professor Woman waited for the last gangly student to be seated before he started talking.
“I am Associate Professor John Woman,” he announced, “and this class is Introduction to Deconstructionist Historical Devices.”
A hand went up in the second row.
“You will be able to ask questions in a few minutes,” he said and the hand went down. “But first I’d like to explain what will happen, what you might learn and what you cannot learn, in this seminar.
“It is my position that history is an unquestionable certainty, the absolute outcome of an incontrovertible string of ontological events. It, history, reaches all the way back to the origin of the race and beyond through the chaotic unfolding of existence. In our history, our one indisputable history, are contained assassinations, inspiration, instinctual urges, friendships, conflicts, the multiplicities of gravity and material, black holes and supernovas. Our bodies are formed from the fabric of the universe and so consequently there is a touch of the divine in each of us. You and I are part and parcel of history, slaves of history, playing out our willing and unwilling roles — and so it has been for every living being, every species on earth and, quite possibly, life elsewhere.
“Accepting, for a moment, this position as accurate it is easy to see that the true understanding of history, or any major aspect thereof, requires knowledge that is currently beyond human ken. We are like the blind prophets guessing at the nature of an elephant — only the elephant is in another room, situated on the opposite side of the globe, while we still believe the world is flat.”
John stopped for a moment. He had not planned this lecture. He hardly ever worked from notes or predetermined arguments.
Our lives are just one long series of ad hoc debates, Herman Jones used to say. In the end everybody loses the argument.