Chapter Three

The university is so quiet after hours.  If one were to listen carefully, the dominant strain is the rustling of leaves.  All of the voices heard between lamplit avenues are far off, and indistinct.  Elms bode between buildings imported from someone’s idea of the Ivy League, and a slight wind whispers through the cold and almost vacant stonework.

        The Tail is sitting in his office in the Humanities building.  The Humanities building is an uninteresting brick structure, five or six floors high, nestled amidst a clutter of other, equally uninteresting brick buildings.  Some of these buildings are older, stately edifices dating back to the 1800s, while others are less tasteful architectural experiments that recall the postwar years, and more serious students in ties and slacks.  The elms that harbor these buildings are perhaps the oldest things here, some of them dating back to a time when more adventurous souls began to move away from old Seattle, and to carve the forested hillside of the lake into roads, single-family dwellings, and the odd commercial venture.  Now an institution of higher learning, this same hillside more closely resembles a park, with vast shadowed lawns sloping down toward the bottom of a hill.  

The Tail’s office is on the second floor of the Humanities building, with a window that looks down on these lawns as they vanish into the benighted periphery.  His office is halfway down a long, wide hall that brings a younger sort of America to mind, a neoclassical sort of America, with polished wooden floors that have weathered the passage of so many feet, and sturdy wooden doors beneath plaster ceilings.  There is a weight of time upon this place.  It is not a weight that one feels in other, newer parts of the university.

        He listens to footsteps recede down the hall outside his office.  A door opens somewhere, and they are gone.  No, he will not listen to those footsteps.  They were never here.  They are gone.  He will not listen.

If he so desired, the Tail could walk through the campus, and easily imagine that he was the only person there.  He could walk all through the Humanities building, all the way down to the bottom of the hill, all the way down to the university hospital, and not see a soul.  Of course he knows that there are others like him in the buildings, all of them locked away in offices much like his own.  And he knows they are all wasting time, or else working desperately to finish something they’ve been putting off for weeks.  But it would be easy to imagine that he is the only person on that campus, so pervasive is the stillness at that hour.

No footsteps now.  Nothing.  They were never here.  Nothing has changed, and there is only the stillness that cold weather brings.  He can hear only the season outside the door, and he is willing himself to unremember what they told him.  He has forgotten already.  There was no one.  No footsteps.  Nothing.

        He turned forty years old today.  He turned forty years old in his office with his desk, his office chair, and his shelves bearing centuries of history.  It is his birthday, and he is now four decades old.  It is his birthday, and he is trying not to think about how many years might lie before him.

He is not a man that most would describe as handsome, yet he is not a man remarkable enough to be ugly.  His eyes lie hidden behind his spectacles, and if others find the intensity of his gaze disconcerting, he cannot be blamed for it.  The fires that burn within him were kindled long before.  The impulsiveness of his nature has been harnessed to circumstance, and his occasional flights of poetic fancy have been shackled to a life badly lived.

He is wearing tan slacks and a white dress shirt.  He is a married man, and the ring upon his finger still gives him a sense of satisfaction.  Even after so many years.  He will never know what he, the shy sensitive boy encased in a much older body, did to deserve his loving wife.  He has never looked too deeply into the matter, because he is afraid of the answer he will find.

He sits at a large oak desk with a glass top.  This desk is much older than he is, and the metal fittings and assorted knobs upon its drawers were fashioned in Pennsylvania, in the 1920s.  The oak was harvested somewhere in the eastern US, and the metal fittings and knobs may not be the original fittings and knobs, which he suspects rusted away due to neglect.  He is sitting in a modern black office chair, purchased with university funds five years previous, and manufactured in China.  His laptop, this year’s model and assembled in Taiwan, sits before an older PC on his desk.  Next to the door there is a wooden coat rack and a framed photo of his family, his wife and two daughters.  Beneath this is a reproduction of a woodcut taken from some medieval source, an alchemical allegory involving a flying lizard, flames, and an androgynous figure holding a scepter.  Two sets of shelves, extending from the floor to the ceiling, cover the walls in front and behind him, and upon these shelves are books in English, Latin, German, French, Greek, Spanish, and Italian.  Many of these books are very dusty, very worn, and certainly out of print.  Some of the books look positively ancient.  Next to his desk is the window, and that side of the room is bare save for a clock that hangs upon the wall.

        He’s working on the last few pages of a textbook.  He is writing this textbook in conjunction with several other prominent historians, and it is still a long way from completion.  Later comes proofreading.  Later come peer reviews.  He has been put in charge of the chapters near the end, those concerned with modern problems and modern life.  He tries to sound very open-minded as he writes about cloning, nanotechnology, and global warming, but he fears that within himself there lies a much older man, half-slumbering, who would usurp his words for other, crotchety ends.  He wants to write as a younger man would write, but he is on the verge of being old.

        He wants to finish his pages quickly so he can go home.  He has told himself that he must finish ten pages a day.  He cannot explain why, but a sense of urgency mediates against his desire to finish the pages.  

        No one is here, he tells himself.  I have been alone for hours.

He is writing a chapter on biotechnology and population pressure, but other thoughts intrude.  He is writing, but his thoughts are far away from the page.  He is wondering why his penis doesn’t work anymore.  He is thinking about how unsatisfied his wife must be.  He is meditating on Viagra, on the wrinkles around his eyes, and on the idea of obsolescence.  He is reflecting on the day before, when he asked her if she ever thought about cheating on him.  He expected her to say no, but instead she just smiled strangely, and told him not to worry.  

In the end, he thinks, we all become our fathers and our mothers.  He reflects on his own father, even as he tries to assemble coherent thoughts on the human genome.  He realizes, at last, what an impotent man his father must have been.

        He has been alive for forty years, and here he sits in his office, alone.  He has occupied this office for so many years, and he knows this office like he knows his own skin.  Even those books upon his shelves, he knows them like his own skin.  He has read all of those books, and he has searched for the enlightenment they offer.  His moments of realization were fleeting.  

Most of those books were merely a means to an end.  They were the means of passing a test, or of writing a paper, or – as now – of writing another book.  This book he is writing, in turn, will be a means to an end for other people.  They will study his book in order to pass a test or write a paper, and if they are ambitious enough they will one day write enough papers and pass enough tests to write their own books, books that will make his own seem antiquated, unfashionable, and irrelevant.  One generation cannibalizing the ideas of the previous generation.  The young standing upon the stooped shoulders of the old.

He has studied a great number of books, and his books have been studied in turn.  All of the books were about other books, written by people about other people.  Now at forty, he asks himself if all of the books written by all of the people really uncovered some bit of relevant information that everyone didn’t already know, or if they were not all exercises in triviality.  “Of making books there is no end,” said The Preacher, “And in much study there lies a weariness of flesh.”

        He cannot say how many hours, or how many days of his life have been exhausted in this room, and at this desk.  He has the feeling he wouldn’t like the answer.  From the beginning he has seen a worth in human knowledge, but at this moment, in the throes of his fortieth name day, he can see only futility in his strivings after Truth.  Perhaps he was looking too hard at books, when he should have been living life more fully.

        And yet, he has had a few friends – now friends no longer - who have done just that.  Here he is, not so many years later, with some of those friends dead, and others poor, and still others ruined in other ways.  These friends burned brightly for a moment, but their fires were quickly extinguished.

        He should put something in here about fuel cells.  What was it that Ryerson said about the fuel economy?  There should be a quote he can work in after the fuel cell part.  Nothing in his books about that.  Maybe he can find something with Google.  

He knows librarians that despise the Internet.  They think that the sum of what we know can still – with the right footnotes – be contained in periodicals and shelves of books.  Even to him, who has been for so much of his life the slave of books, this sort of librarian is a sad, fossilized creature, better forced into retirement.  The Internet is not going away.  The future, however disquieting, is upon us.

        His wife is at home.  His daughters are asleep.  And here he is alone, again.  That feeling of urgency pushes through.  Something tells him that he should go see his wife.  He told her this morning that he would be home much later, but he suddenly feels so mournful and lonely.  He never would have thought that his 30s – his dismal 30s – could shine so brilliantly.  Old, old, old… and his wife might comfort him.  She might help him to forget.

        Yes, there are times when it is better to forget.  Footsteps echo through his brain.  But he has to remind himself again that he has been alone the whole time, and that he has received no visitors.  There is nothing to worry about, because no one has been by.  No sounds of footfalls in the hall.  No one is there.  Nothing.

        He turns off his laptop and leaves everything at his desk.  He stands up slowly, knowing that there will be much more work the next day.  The publisher can wait, and he won’t write anything worth reading now anyway.  What does he know about global warming?  What can he say about Microsoft and anti-trust legislation?  Oh, he is an old man today.  He is old and he doesn’t want to die.

        He picks up his coat from the back of his chair and pulls down a few books for tomorrow.  From his office he walks down the hall without locking his door, and at the end of the hall he pushes through a pair of antique double doors and steps out into the cool night air beyond.  It is a chilly night in October, and the leaves are beginning to fall.  A great elm stands above him, and the footpath is wet.  He breathes in autumn as he heads towards his car.

        As he walks his shoulders slump forward, making him appear much shorter than he truly is.  He has an odd way of walking, with his heels rising up too high behind each step, and his feet striking the ground at an unusual angle.  He wears orthopedic shoes to correct for abnormally shaped feet, but these shoes were employed very late into his forty years, and by that time his eccentric gait had developed beyond his shoes’ ability to correct for it.

        The cement path leads him through drifts of leaves around to the eastern side of the building, and as he walks the glare from a few office windows above make squares and rectangles upon the path where he is walking.  The path leads around a dark hedge, and past the hedge there is a parking lot illuminated by street lights that trace the progress of an adjoining road up the hill and out of the campus.  

His car, a dark-colored Toyota missing a hubcap, sits very close to where the path meets the parking lot.  There are only two other cars parked there, and also a mountain bike chained to a nearby lamppost.  He enters the clean interior of his car, starts the engine after a couple of unsuccessful attempts, and after backing out a few yards he begins driving out of the parking lot, up the road that leads away from campus.  He doesn’t listen to music as he drives.

        The drive home takes him about fifteen minutes.  He turns right on 45^th, with the frat houses and sororities visible across the street.  45^th leads him across a downward slanting bridge in front of the University Village shopping center, and on the other side of the bridge he navigates the complicated interchange in front of the shopping center, and continues east into the suburbs.  The streets are very dark, and there are few other cars on the road.  He follows the road up and down over hills, steadily advancing towards a neighborhood on a ridge that overlooks Lake Washington, not far from Magnuson Park.  Then he turns left, and traces the crest of the ridge to his house, which is found along a curving street to his left.

        He pulls up into the driveway of his house, a handsome two-story property with a magnificent view.  It is a white house with a sloping shingled roof and a tall chimney, with white siding and two large sets of windows looking out from both floors.  It is the sort of house they built in the 50s, with solid foundations and straight nails.  

He notices a light shining from behind a window on the first floor, where the living room would be, and thinks it strange that this should be the only light still visible from the outside of the house.  He then considers going back to the university, or to a bar, somewhere with people, but quickly decides against these other options.  He searches his pockets for his house keys as he exits his car, walking heavily toward the front door.

        That sense of wrongness invades him once again.  He places his key within the lock.  Maybe it is just his age he is feeling.

        The key turns within the lock, and the light from the driveway spills in through the doorway where he is standing, poised as if to enter.  Suddenly so many conversations crowd into the forefront of his consciousness, things said between him and his wife on so many different occasions.  Things he said.  Things he didn’t say.  Things she said.  Things she didn’t say.  He pulls open the door, and steps inside.

        This is when he hears the noise from his living room.  This is when all of the forty years up until today, all the years, all the days, and all the minutes reveal to him the sum of his human knowledge; when they reveal to him that he is, and always has been, a fool.  And as he thinks back upon all these years, and days, and minutes, and all of his loving memories of a wife and children, a vast blackness descends upon his thoughts, deeper than any sadness over growing older.

        This is how he knows that this is not the beginning, but rather the beginning of the end.