The Discipline of Shadows
Up on the chair, I reach for the ceiling and beat the vents, sending mold fluttering downward. Like some black rain, it lands variously on me, on chipped, yellowing tiles, on the paperwork fanned out over my desk. It speckles the latest budget, leaves a trail of powder on the glossy cover of the newest International Journal of Umbrology. It must be going into my lungs. I think about miners descending, invisible until the shaft collapses and the cameras swarm. Maybe, I think, this is what we need — some tragedy. Something more than mere scandal. More than Lew and his lawyer. More than the death of a department, which is like an animal, already limping, vanishing at last under the wheels.
I won’t have time to change my shirt before the big meeting, and for a moment I regret this. After all, lawyers and trustees, the titled and brass-nameplated, will be there. Lew’s “representation,” all the way from Lower Manhattan. At yesterday’s department meeting, the guy sat with Lew, hovering at the edge of my vision, a thick-browed smudge of pleated charcoal. Finally, I wanted to confront him. “Mr. Vadrais,” I wanted to say, “at the end of a workday, when you exit Two Fourteen Pearl, do you ever pause to take in the shadows?” I felt them like a chill, then, those revenants of an older New York, strewn across the narrow, birdshit-encrusted streets.
But I held my tongue. He would’ve been mystified, and the rest of them would’ve all thought I was losing it.
The Department of Umbrology is located in the basement of Sackler Hall on the easternmost edge of campus. Our neighbors are the physical plant and Parking Violations. Students and professors of all ages huff by in three-piece suits and skimpy spaghetti-strappery, tickets in hand, excuses rehearsing themselves upon the tongue. Upstairs is the old Engineering Library (the new one, slated for ribbon cutting in September, a veritable suspension bridge with walls — it stuns) and three rooms the Theater Department uses as a sort of gulag for old props. There’s talk of tearing the building down. The odds of our outliving it? In this economy? I ask you. A memo before the wrecking ball meets the wall is what I hope for.
At four full-timers and one visiting professor, we are the smallest department on the campus (not including the interdisciplinary ones, like Africana Studies and Foreign Languages). I’m sometimes asked to defend my department’s integrity (and I mean this etymologically — no one, till now, has questioned our moral stature, only whether we ought to be considered one). Well, I muse, what about Foreign Languages? Are they “one”? Can we roll up all the vernacular, all the literary traditions, the Day of the Dead and Bastille Day and the notebooks of Dostoyevsky and das Bier und Bratwurst, and, by cramming them together under a single roof, make them one?
Immediately down the hall from my office is that of Dahlia Peterson on one side and Phil Abelard on the other, and then past that is the office of Lew Dorris, and then finally our visiting scholar, Alex Kuperman. Dahlia is our shadow-theater person; she thinks she’s made it to Broadway and I’m not going to disillusion her. Her office, the largest, illuminated from within by Indonesian lamplight, ushers one into a 2-D universe of gauze stretched between bamboo poles, tables overspilling with the most ornate, intricately carved puppets. The room is always alive, CD player blaring gamelan or some mainstream fluff, students snipping and doweling away at all hours like child laborers, only happy, her Brooklyn accent wafting like fresh bagels down the hallway as she chastises them: “Not like that. . Who taught you how to. . Here, here.” She’s superficially abrasive but profoundly gentle, the students inform me — worked to the bone, by term’s end they are putting on virtuoso epics of Bali, Turkey, or China, and in Advanced they Westernize, shadow-working their family memoir, slave ships with oars the luminous water pushes back at, streets that seem somehow paved in gold even if just variants of black, always, Marge Simpson makes an appearance, it’s a running joke. Abelard is the one who’s been here longer than I and grown way too complacent. Doesn’t bother with office hours, hasn’t produced an iota of scholarship in twelve years. Wrote his book about shadows in lit back in the day, but since he got tenure, it’s been a handful of conference talks and Easy Rider in his swivel chair. Kuperman’s fresh blood but wrong blood type — hasn’t panned out at all. My hopes were high. A scholar of neonoir, he’s actually produced a film you might’ve seen, The Better Half? So we’ve snagged ourselves a bona fide celeb. Too bad he’s always on the phone with his agent — pair of Bluetooth pincers, one on each ear. He teaches on Tuesdays, and then I swear he slips out between the blinds, jetting back to L.A.; his weekends start Wednesdays. I won’t miss him, nor will the students. He was a mistake — a case of mistaken identity, you might say, with no more interest in shadows than a rooster has in gold coins. But one door farther down is Dorris, our rock star. Astrophysicist, Ph.D. 1987 from Dartmouth, his long, frothy hair cascading onto ample shoulders, but don’t be distracted — you’ll need all of your cognitive faculties as he leaps from discussing what happens to shadows from objects approaching the speed of light to the tiny fingerprints left behind by the particles called muons. Then he unwinds by pummeling his way through some video game, sounds like a teenager in there, tearing things up, kicking through walls and mowing down Nazis. Like some home brewer, he even designs his own games as pastime. But no ego on him, no Kuperman. He produces, too — four reputable journal pubs in the past year, four! Unheard of. One in the Umbro, too, the mothership, damn him.
As for me, my work is much more mundane. Philosophy — the ontology of shadows in the history of thought, and given the postlinguistic turn, of course, how they’re treated in language. Plus, I oversee the department. I’ve chaired for eleven years now and probably will till I retire or keel over. No one else wants it — can you imagine Dahlia, with her sextuple-jointed puppets, filing a budget or tracking postgrad job stats? She may talk like a Flatbush Avenue importer with her students, but she’s a softy when it comes to the bureaucrats. I’m not crazy about paperwork but I’m orderly and never cowed, especially by some administrator with a diploma in something called “public policy.”
And hey, if Lew wants to cash in on his research so his two kids can go to their colleges of choice, can I blame him? He can even justify it morally — he’s making the world a safer place. His algorithms will help snare terrorists huddling in the mountains of western Pakistan. Help rid the world of evil.
Not incidentally, they’ll also make him rich, and in the meantime the terrorists will cover their tracks better, find alternate hideouts, go deeper, where their shadows, seen only by the walls, won’t betray them.
Still, I don’t hold it personally against Lew. With Edmund, it feels a bit more personal, more Et tuish. After all, I recruited him, groomed him, saved him from the fate of a giant state school with its rows of clonelike cheerleaders and ambiguously mammalian mascot. Last time our eyes met, he ducked between buildings and I caught his shadow as it fluttered for a millisecond at the corner, as if hesitating. He was gone. Cold shoulder no mere figure of speech.