There was a woman once, though. A couple of flings but only one, really (I don’t count my sundial maiden). Valerie stayed awhile — months. She got me to talk about things I never had, try things, foods — Indian, Tibetan, Moroccan — whose existence I’d had only a vague awareness of before. She took me out to a ball game, prodding me every few hitters with little quizzes about what had just happened. At museums, she’d take me by the shoulders and gently pull me away from the canvas, forcing me to take in paintings at a sweeping glance and describe how they made me feel. She made me carry her bags, restock her lip balm, sniff her slippers, all of which I have to admit I enjoyed. Together, we salvaged a dog, Saskia, from the ASPCA, gave her a home, and even cured her of the habit of peeing at the slightest jarring sound.
Val didn’t even mind my endless discoursing about shadows, though she told me once she preferred rainy days because on them I looked at her more directly. She talked about us relocating to Seattle. Maybe there I could shed my strange “wandering eye.” She only half-believed me when I insisted it was shadows I was watching askance instead of other women. Somehow my gaze would be pulled in the direction of the most stunning or scantily clad (so she claimed — I hadn’t noticed), and later that evening she’d be sobbing or, as the months went on, brooding in ruffled distraction.
Once, watching her apply mascara, I pointed out that makeup was nothing more than the insinuation of shadows onto the face to feign the signs of youth. I said this as I might have to my undergrads — the type of assertion they’d record dutifully, and which every so often incited them to lively discussion and intellectual sparring — although afterward I have suspected that I may have meant to hurt her for some reason. At the time, her brushstrokes held steady. But a day later, she announced that nothing — no therapy, no medication, no aphrodisiac, no self-help book, no spontaneous trip — could bridge the gulf that lay between us.
Rasmussen, president of the university, has staked out Intro Umbro and pulls me into an empty adjoining room after I dismiss them, shutting the door behind him. He doesn’t bother flipping on the light. “Glenn,” he says, appearing troubled, maybe slightly haggard. “I wanted to feel you out on this one. What’s the mood? What is it going to take today with Lew?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I shrug. “He has a lawyer. We’re no longer communicating directly.”
“I see.” He mulls this over. “How can I sweeten the pot.” It is more statement than question. I’m reminded anew of how unctuous I’ve always found him. Never a glimmer of interest in our departmental offerings, goings-on. Quick to pardon a plagiarist whose parents are paying in full. “Look,” he continues, “I want to be fair to him, and fair to the university.”
“Of course.”
“There’s one more thing, Glenn.” His voice falls to a hush, and I can hear the din of students milling about between classes. “I’ve had some people contact me. Homeland Security. This is in the strictest of confidence. Obviously, this algorithm is, you know, really something.”
“I know about as much as you.”
“I don’t know whether to mention Homeland Security today. I don’t want to scare anyone.”
Oh but you do, I thought. “That’s entirely your call.”
“Maybe I’ll hold it in reserve.” I can’t make out his eyes in the dim light, can’t discern whether he is waiting for some kind of response.
My feelings about Book Seven of Plato’s Republic are likely slightly more virulent than even the average umbrologist’s.
“Motherfucking Plato,” I was telling Lew Dorris one May. My best students were graduating and going on to Nantucket and New York, one to be an architect for the summer hautes monde, the other to serve as a loading-dock clerk. It was depressing. “Fuck motherfucking Plato. Far as I’m concerned, he can take it gangbang-style from Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus one-two-three.”
Lew was a fiendish player of darts. We’d completed a round or two, and Lew’s feather shadows were clustering around the bull’s-eye, forming a penumbra, where mine were lost in floorboards and flopping miserably off a vintage Guinness pelican beak.
“Ease up, Glenn” is what he was saying. “Get one near the board.”
“No, but I mean. .” I stammered. “Take Plato out of the picture, look at what we get. Respectability, Lew, that’s what we get. The respect we got coming. Galileo, motherfucker,” I said. “Galileo knew the value of a shadow.”
Each time I squeezed a dart before the furrows I could feel in my brow, he’d shrink back, watching people in the vicinity nervously. “Glenn,” he said. “If it isn’t Plato it’s someone else. People aren’t made to love shadows. It’s that simple.”
“Screw that,” I said. “We are made to love them. Hello? Three-dimensional vision?” Hearing myself saying it, I felt foolish: I’m going to remind Lew Dorris about 3-D vision.
“Glenny,” he said. “It’s the end of the semester. Take some time off. Go to Orlando.”
I knew Dorris was speaking figuratively — he knew I had neither a family nor a desire to cavort with giant cartoon replicas. For a moment, it crossed my mind that roller-coaster shadow in Florida sun could be manna, the theme park itself a sort of Rorschach of America.