“Lemme ask you something, Lew,” I said. “Thought experiment. Lessay you can go back in time and ya have the chance t’ssassinate Plato. You’re alone with him, no one’s looking. This is before he writes Book Seven, okay?” I felt myself growing more lucid in the act of speaking. In ten minutes I’d be puking in the alley behind the bar. “Do you do it?”
“Glenn.” He shook his head.
“It’s a hypothetical,” I said. “Critical thinking, just like we ask our students, right? All of Western philosophy a footnote to Plato. Versus giving shadows an outside shot at r-e-s-p-c-e-t.”
“You’re drunker than you think you are,” said Lew.
But, you say, Plato’s Myth of the Cave is the stuff of academicians only, any prejudices that it instills in us merely academic ones. You say there is no abiding denigration of shadows in our society, subconscious or otherwise. I, however, know otherwise, having felt the sting of discrimination firsthand. Most memorably at a ski slope this past winter, a gleaming December day, ideal conditions for shadow watching. By ideal (sorry, Plato, I’m stealing back that word), I don’t mean only from a weather standpoint; consider the slope itself, its perpetual careenings, poles and skis jutting against a bright scrim of snow. Nothing surpasses a city street in summer, with its buildings, awnings, pedestrians, cane-bearing and non-, cyclists with mesh baskets and spokes, dogs tugging on leashes, three-card-monte tables evaporating quickly as they were thrown together, shoulder-strapped bags, cradled melons. But still.
I was out on the slope, staring, admittedly. Had I been a sociolinguist or a family-systems therapist, I might have holed up in the lodge, pretending to read a book and taking in conversation all around me. You might think that after twenty years of study I’d grow weary of shadow watching—They’re all alike, are they not? Yet I’m certain that only now, after these decades, have they begun to yield up their secrets to me.
The ski patrol approached me, two directly, one hanging back, American flags sewn onto their shoulders. “Hey, buddy,” one said.
“Yes, sir.”
“How are you today, sir?”
“Fine, just fine.”
“We’ve had some people saying you’ve been here in this spot quite a while. Doin’ a whole lot of looking.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“You, ummm, waiting for somebody? Planning on skiing today, or got kids on the slopes?”
I looked down at an absence of skis. The outlines of my interrogators towered on the heavily trodden snow, stretching till they struck the roofline of the lodge. Mine merged with theirs.
“I’m an umbrologist,” I chanced.
“What’s ’at you say?”
I started to give the usual explanation.
“That doesn’t sound like a real thing. Is that a real thing?” he asked one of his compadres, who shrugged and grunted. “Well, look, irregardless, this here’s a family recreation spot. So I suggest you maybe find yourself an alternative viewing location.” Then after a moment: “Sir, can you look at me now, in the eye?”
I let my eye climb up his torso slowly, nodding. He went on: “We’ve had some unsavory characters here recently, if you know what I mean, so we need to know that you’re here to ski or with someone that’s skiing, or you’re gonna have to move along.”
Skia—Greek for shadow. “Have you read Plato’s Republic, Book Seven?”
His partner stepped in. “Sir, we’re not gonna stand here and be mocked. This is a ski resort.”
“I was under the impression it was a mountain.”
“I’m gonna give him. . I’m gonna give you one more chance to walk to your car.”
As they escorted me, flanking me, with the radio-bearing one behind, I didn’t resist, and it occurred to me that much of this could have been avoided had I simply invented, say, that I was blind.
The morning Edmund informed me that next semester he was going to work with Lew rather than with me, I’d been daydreaming and had almost rammed into a stopped car that was waiting for some animal to cross. I’d managed to slam on the brakes, and my pulse was still pounding when I arrived at the office. Edmund slipped his news, then, into this strange pocket of relief.
“Well.” I’d sucked in my breath, disappointment lodging somewhere down in the region of my diaphragm. “That’s fantastic. And all the Greek you’ve been learning — you’re simply going to forget it?”
“Never!” he said in mock horror. His tone pivoted, though. “It does make sense, though, doesn’t it? You support the move?”
It did. It shouldn’t have arrived as a shock. With the majors or even those with an umbrology concentration, I’m their first love, ushering them into the field. I do a little bit of everything in Intro, an exotic uncle with a seemingly bottomless bag of novelties, a living room vaudeville act. Once they’ve had a taste of the more advanced classes, though, steeped in one or another subfield, they specialize. Mostly, they move on, cordial to a fault — I get an occasional email, or they drop in to tell me about their thesis or gripe about how Abelard holds their papers hostage.
But I couldn’t believe Edmund was sitting in my office telling me this; he’d practically lived there these past two years. As my research assistant, he had access to hundreds of pages that, thankfully, no one else will ever see. But he did more than track down references — he filled the margins with comments, netting fresh references from the Sargasso of mediocre scholarship. He’d spent hours in the scuffed, stained armchair, its foamy entrails pouring out as we talked about Pliny and Rembrandt and impossible objects and life, too, his ups and downs with his girlfriend, his mother’s battle with depression.
It was little wonder he was destined to go with Lew.
The meeting feels like a courtroom except without any designation of who’s on what side. Empty chairs flank me. Rasmussen presides in gray vestments, sport coat and striped shirt and white tie with what look like spouting little blue whales. Lew sprawls, too-long legs jutting awkwardly till they’re practically in the center of the room, Vadrais on one side and Edmund on the other, and then there’s Amos Duffy from Mathematics, and Sue Gessen, a dean with whom he’s chummy, and I wave to her. Next to them are trustees I only know from meetings like this one — though there’s not been one exactly like this one. Next is Kuperman, and, sitting right next to him, Dahlia. The president looks jovial, or looks as if he’s straining toward some Platonic form of joviality, and everyone else appears overly severe. Even Kuperman looks like he’s been cast in a serious role in one of his movies; I didn’t know he had it in him.
Rasmussen starts things off with a toothy smile. “We’re gathered because we understand that you, Professor Dorris, have developed an idea here at the university that just might benefit all of us. So, essentially, seeing ourselves as pioneers of the twenty-first century, looking to ride out these tough times, we’d like to know how we can help you and help ourselves and. . help our students.”
His voice drones on and I pluck some wasabi peas out of the bag, the few that remain, loading them on my tongue like bullets. Then I am drawn to tug and pull at my eyelid with my nonwasabi hand. This makes his image double and appear to lean, like some aspect of him is bowing or trying to get out, and the tilted version exhibits a deference so foreign to his character that I can’t help but find it amusing. I send him back and forth like this. The transformation continues, the head expanding and reshaping itself, tendrils coiling outward till he’s no longer a balding bureaucrat, but a sort of shadow puppet villain in a demonic headdress, hinged at the joints, and I start to hear strains of gamelan as he makes his false-friendly pitch. A Demon-king.