PART I: THE CRISIS
CHAPTER 1
Padraig stared at the blank page. He adjusted slightly in his seat and the wooden swivel chair squeaked once in response. The room around him was empty except for his chair, his desk, his typewriter, and the mid-century abstract painting that he had found at the antique shop and hung on the wall behind him. The simplicity was all Cassie’s idea, after she had purged the house in a very premature Swedish death cleanse—premature and a little precocious for a couple in their fifties.
But the simplicity suited Padraig who could pretend—almost daily—that he was in a bygone time. Even his typewriter was a refurbished Underwood, from the same antique shop as the painting. The typewriter was a concession by Cassie. She may have preferred that Padraig use a computer with all its efficiency, but the typewriter’s clickety-clack allowed her to keep tabs on his progress.
It’s 1961, Padraig thought to himself. Kennedy is President. Writers are king. Truth has promise. His hands rested lightly on the keys, as if he could channel the 1960s through his fingertips. But his fingers paused. He continued to stare at the blank page. Nothing came to him and he increasingly felt the pressure of his ass against the wood of the chair and the small crest that ran up the center of the seat. He felt his hemorrhoid now and adjusted his long, skinny legs. The chair squeaked again. His fingers sat motionless. The white page glared at him.
Thump went the door. Padraig’s head jerked back to the 2020s. That was Cassie’s warning knock, which meant he had been silent for fifteen minutes. He typed one word, a letter at time, d-e-m-i-s-e-m-i-s-e-p-t-c-e-n-t-e-n-n-i-a-l. He relished the click-clacks that broke the silence and bought him some time.
But nothing came. It was the 175th anniversary since the Washington Territory, the demisemiseptcentennial. And he was supposed to celebrate that through a poem. That was the job of the Poet Laureate of the State of Washington. It earned him no additional pay and only a per diem on days that he had to drive to the capitol, but it was an honor that impressed even his implacable Dean. And so, at the beck and call of the Governor, Padraig turned out celebratory poems for inaugurations and anniversaries. And now he had to write an ode to the demisemiseptcentennial.
His mind churned for inspiration. Millard Filmore signed the law creating the territory. A joke of a President. Nothing there. Isaac Stevens was the first governor. Fillmore chose him because he killed a whole lot of Indians. Nothing there. The tribes were in shambles from war, disease, and alcohol. Nothing there. His fingers sat motionless. The hemorrhoid flared again and Padraig shifted in his seat, the chair squeaking, and Padraig wondering for a moment if he should just go to the mall for a modern office chair.
He breathed in. 1960s, he thought, breathing out, his fingers ready. But the phone rang from another room, breaking his thoughts, bringing his attention back to the pressure on his ass. A moment later, Cassie was pounding on the door. “It’s Morgan,” she said, and Padraig’s stomach tightened. Morgan was the Governor’s Chief of Staff and the messenger for all the Governor’s most pedestrian poetry requests—more Hallmark and less Ginsberg, Padraig had long since surmised.
Cassie slipped his cell phone under the door. Padraig got out of his chair and took it. “Hello,” he answered, returning to his chair.
“Pat,” Morgan began.
“Padraig,” Padraig corrected him.
“Patrick,” Morgan said.
“Padraig,” Padraig corrected him again. In fact, on any legal document, his name was Pat Mulligan. He had started writing it as Padraig Ó Maolagáin sometime in high school.
“Whadda you got for me?”
Padraig glanced at his nearly blank page. “I’m working on it.”
“Ceremony’s in a week. You gotta get something down. Governor’s counting on you.”
Padraig adjusted the phone slightly. “Demisemiseptcentennial is not the easiest prompt for a poem.”
“Can’t rhyme it?” Morgan asked mockingly.
“My poems don’t rhyme,” Padraig said, dryly.
“Maybe they should,” Morgan snorted.
“This can’t just wait until the bicentennial?”
“In twenty-five years, the Governor will be dead.”
“Really?” Padraig asked. “He’s not even fifty.”
“Politically speaking. But this, now, the 175th—very big deal. The Daughters of the Washington Territory represent a key demographic of suburban women between the ages of sixty and just short of dead. Those ladies vote, Pat, and so I need that poem.” He ignored Padraig’s sigh. “You’re the laureate,” Morgan reminded him. “This is what it’s all about.”
“Short-term news cycles,” Padraig answered. He adjusted his ass.
“Something like that. So write it. Now,” he commanded. The call ended.
Padraig slipped his phone back under the door for Cassie to pick up whenever she walked by again. His attention returned to his page. He focused, breathing, unable to imagine anything but rows and rows of old white ladies. He mindlessly plucked at the keys. Then the room was silent again. The silence dragged on, and he felt it pushing on him, pushing his ass against the chair, pushing on his hemorrhoid, screaming now.
Thump-thump-thump went another pounding on the door, Cassie’s second warning. “Write,” she called to him. And all he could think of was Millard Fillmore and old white ladies and the itching scream on his ass. He mindlessly typed and then stopped again.
“Write!” Cassie called to him again, and then several more times, as his hands rested impotently against the typewriter keys.
At last—meaning one hour without the sound of typing—Cassie stepped up to the door and the sound of the old skeleton key clanked against the door and the door opened. She stood there, hand against her defiant hip. “Anything?” she asked, one meticulously plucked eyebrow curved up inquisitively.
Padraig swept some unkempt curls back from his forehead and looked sheepishly at his page. Under the word demisemiseptcentennial, he had typed,
I once had a pain in the rear,
More tragic than sad old King Lear,
I tried out some lotions
And naturopath potions,
But said no to salmonine schmear.
“Well,” he said, Cassie now leaning over his chair, “it’s a poem.”
CHAPTER 2
The writing hours had ended, and Cassie had long given up on hearing the sound of the typewriter. Instead, she sat in the living room, reading on her Kindle. On the coffee table before her, she had set the newspaper, which Padraig insisted on reading in print. Padraig, still hunched from the day’s failure, dropped into the chair across from her and took up the paper. The soft polyurethane seat of the chair–one of Cassie’s purchases–eased Padraig’s discomfort.
Cassie looked up, concerned. “You weren’t as productive as usual. Is everything okay?”
Padraig frowned. “I’m a poet laureate who’s lost faith in democracy and God all at once. No, not okay.” Cassie sat straighter, the posture that told Padraig she was listening. “We’ve lost our way, Cassie.”
“I think you declared that every year since Jerry Brown lost to Clinton.”
“Correction—it started when Kennedy lost to Carter in ’79.” He held up his hands, almost in apology. “We used to believe in things. Ideas that tethered us—from the past to the future.” His hands fell. He shook his head. “Not anymore. Now it’s all short-term. A quick buck. Nothing is built to last.”
He raised the newspaper. “Take immigration. We deport violent criminals to El Salvador. Now MS-13 runs El Salvador. So people flee—millions of them. They then get exploited and feed MS-13. Then they get deported, fed right back into the machine.” He jabbed a finger toward the mess in the paper. “But no one wants to fix it. That takes time. And we’ve trained ourselves to think in soundbites—Twitter-sized attention spans. Short-term logic, short-term memory.” He let the paper fall and slumped. “We don’t share anything with the generations before us or after. Nothing binds us.” He shifted in his seat, the hemorrhoid bothering him again. “Our leaders used to think things through,” he said quietly. “And once, you could almost believe in a God who cared.”
“Padraig,” Cassie said when she was trying to steer him, “you’re anxious about the new semester. This always happens, since 1979, apparently. You’ll bounce back.” She leaned back into the sofa. “Also, you’re forgetting about Vietnam.”
“Not Kennedy’s fault!” Padraig said, although he wouldn’t be baited into this fight again. He stood up.
“You’ll bounce back,” she called to his back. “Give it a week! You’ll be too busy to be this self-indulgent!"
CHAPTER 3
Padraig’s office at the college–ideally–was a continuation of his home office. But unlike his home office, he allowed himself some professorial clutter here, with bookshelves crammed with dog-eared novels, half-organized notebooks, half-read New Yorkers, and bundles more of letters, papers, agendas of symposia, and scraps of paper with the unsprouted seeds of future poems.
At the center of his desk, he kept a matching Underwood typewriter where he wrote notes on his students’ essays, plucked from the roller and stapled to the back of each paper. It was up to James, the singular administrative assistant for the entire Literature Department, to pry the staple away, scan the typed notes, convert that to a readable PDF, and document it for each student. Padraig did not know what happened after he dropped his notes in the basket on James’s desk. Padraig believed it was critical that he stay in his own lane and leave James to do his job as he must. Each member of the department, from the Assistant Dean to the administrative assistant, was a separate organ of a singular body whose purpose was to excrete literature into the mouths of hungry students. Padraig only asked to be left to do his part in the manner that he chose.
He was therefore irate when he found his desk despoiled–his Underwood pushed aside and a new docking station with a gray laptop folded at its center. Padraig studied it with his arms crossed. “What is this?” he asked to his empty office. Then he repeated the question into the hall. “What is this?” he called, and James looked at him with confusion before hurrying forward, hugging a pile of papers.
Padraig turned back to the threat before him. With his arms still folded and his jaws clenched, he leaned closer to the laptop. Its gray reminded him of the barren asphalt where he had parked his car. He took his fountain pen from the inside pocket of his tweed. Using its tip, he wedged the laptop open until its screen faced him. A sterile blue light told him it was alive. “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?” he asked it.
And as if in response, a chat box opened on the screen. “See me ASAP,” it read. An icon of the Assistant Dean appeared beside it.
Padraig screwed the lid back on his pen and strode down the hall.
Dean Tabitha Rose was a scholar of French Romanticism and an expert on Charles Baudelaire about whom she had written three books. That poet’s revolutionary spirit was quaint and distant, and so it did not bother anyone in Administration. And his eroticism and debauchery was still real enough that it played well with her colleagues. She was in her fifties, with hazel eyes, a figure trim for pantsuits, and crows feet that documented years of reading and managing. She was, without a doubt, the most presentable face of the Literature Department to the outside world. She was also implacable, professional, and patient with Padraig’s quixotisms.
“You know why I asked you here, right?” she asked. “I received three calls from the Governor’s Office in the last day, all because you’re not responding.” She leaned forward, her hands together. Padraig recognized this as her Concerned Mother technique. “Padraig, I cannot be fielding calls for you with the Governor’s Office. I have a department to run.”
Padraig looked at her and then shook his head. “I can’t do it, Tabitha. I’m going to resign. I have lost faith in democracy, and so I shall not sing its praises as Poet Laureate.”
“Of Washington,” she added.
“What?”
“Poet Laureate of Washington,” she explained, leaning back. She was done humoring him. “You often leave out the qualifying prepositional phrase. It makes you sound like you’re Amanda Gorman.”
Padraig waved his hand. “Whatever,” he said, irritated. He considered pedantry unbecoming of anyone but himself. “I can’t do it.”
The Dean’s jaw tightened. “Padraig, did anyone ask you to put your name in for Poet Laureate of Washington?” And before he could answer, she continued. “I did not ask for it, and I would never expect it. But I do simply demand that your position as Poet Laureate of Washington not sully the Department simply because you flaked out.”
Before Padraig could respond, the Dean stood up, leading Padraig to stand, which allowed her to shepherd him out the door. “So get back to work and write that poem. You start a new semester tomorrow. That should help you reset yourself.”
Padraig turned awkwardly in the doorway so that he was nearly nose to nose with the Dean. “One last thing,” he said, holding his fountain pen in the air, “I don’t like the new computer.”
Dean Rose continued to push him forward. “New policy. Check your email. Everyone has to use the same technology.”
Padraig used the space of the hallway to turn completely on the Dean. “But I was the only one not using the same technology.”
The Dean smiled wryly. “Fair enough,” she said. “There were complaints about your clacking.”
Padraig looked at her with disgust. “Clacking,” he repeated. “Shameful.”
“Oh, be warned,” she added, “the new computers have AI preloaded.”
Padraig wished to avoid his computer for the rest of the day, but stuck in his office, trying to write, he had no success. As he tried to write longhand on a pad, his arm kept bumping into the lit-up docking station. Its monitor obstructed his movement. Its cords tethered around his desk like jungle vines. With so much hardware, he had no more desk space to use his typewriter. He would not have dared, even if he could.
He finally gave up, standing up with a huff and gathering his papers and bundling them into his battered portfolio case. He decided to stop downtown on Antique Row. He needed typewriter oil for his Underwood, and he could use a chat with Claudius–perhaps the only man in Padraig’s life whose love of the past outmatched his own.
Claudius’s shop, Déjà Vu, had the misfortune of sharing its name with Seattle’s largest strip club. Claudius insisted his shop came first, and the proper use of accents would distinguish them.
The shop was one in a row of aging storefronts, each a jumbled, desperate time capsule. The front half of Déjà Vu was a maze of glass cases, each packed with the glittering detritus of decades—war medals, porcelain miniatures, tarnished brooches, and dried-up fountain pens. Behind the cases, in the furniture room, a riot of eras clashed in close quarters—obscure Impressionists elbowed pop art, Bauhaus chairs leaned against carved Victorian chifferobes, all crammed together like a world’s refugees in a shared tenement.
When Padraig arrived, Claudius was standing at the front counter, watching attentively over Padraig’s shoulder. “Is he still there?” Claudius asked.
Padraig turned, but saw nobody. “Who’s he?”
“Negro kid,” Claudius said, still watching vigilantly. Claudius was white and over seventy.
Padraig winced. “Was this black kid bothering you?” he asked, turning again.
“He definitely had my cackles up. Anyway.” He set a vintage Louisville Slugger against the wall and came out from behind the counter. Behind him, there appeared to be a set of mammy jars, their cartoon smiles looking right at him. He should say something.
Instead, he adjusted his scarf and asked about typewriter oil. He was tired. He couldn't argue with every old man in a crumbling republic.
They sat down in the pair of Bauhaus chairs. Padraig lowered himself into a sling of leather with trepidation. Across from him, the mammy jars watched him. “Tell me everything,” Claudius said, and Padraig turned back to his host to unload his crisis.
“The present-day is shit,” Claudius concluded, and Padraig nodded. “But you’re overthinking it with all those books of yours. Answer is two words.”
“What’s that?” Padraig asked, and his stomach tightened in anticipation.
“Great Replacement. White men like you and me,” he said, pulling Padraig into a tight circle with a gesture of his hand, “we’re losing out to José and Ali, and that’s not by accident. You know who’s behind this, right?”
And before Claudius could go further, Padraig nodded, vigorously. “It certainly is a theory.” He glanced back at the shelves. The grin on one of the jars stared back at him, judging him.
“They’re collectibles,” Claudius said cheerfully, following Padraig’s gaze. “Real Americana.”
Padraig nodded. His stomach turned. He told himself it was just the bourbon. He stood abruptly. “Shoot, I need to get home.”
“Look into the Replacement,” Claudius said.
“I certainly will,” Padraig said, and taking his bottle of oil, he hurried out. Claudius resumed his watch at the counter.
At home, Padraig evaded Cassie’s questions about his progress. While she worked in the living room on her latest grant proposal, he spent the evening in his chair, staring at the Underwood. The bottle of oil only reminded him of Claudius and his gutless response. His mouth settled into a frown.
Cassie interrupted with Padraig’s evening bourbon, a neat finger in a fluted lowball. She set it down on the desk and glanced at the blank sheet in the typewriter. It hung loosely like a limp flag of surrender. “It’ll turn around with the new semester,” she promised him. She kissed him on the forehead.
PART II: THE NEW SEMESTER
CHAPTER 4
The start of a new term was a storied part of teaching. Professors generally had glitzy lectures that sold their course and their style. Padraig had a colleague–spared the era of Me Too, thank God–who stood up and looked the front row in the eye before declaring, “Over this term, I will penetrate each and every one of you.” He had said it in a well-rehearsed script every new term. He retired when Dean Rose became the first woman to lead the Department.
Padraig usually began with some compelling snippet of poetry that he recited as he walked up and down the aisles. In the past, it played to those students who expected The Dead Poets Society. Now, it just contrasted with anything in their digital lives. The lecture halls pulsed on those days with extra bodies of those shopping their classes or just there for a good lecture.
Today, the hall pulsed, but Padraig only sat silently at the desk. He had brought an old copy of Waste Land, which he thumbed.
The students stared at him. The energy that had been pulsing through the crowded lecture hall now hardened into a thick awkwardness. Finally, after nearly ten minutes, Padraig stood up. Glancing at the epigraph of the book, he whispered to himself: “I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a cage. The boys said, Sibyl, ‘What do you want?’ She replied, ‘I want to die.’” He walked past his crew of Teaching Assistants, the grad students who managed his classes. They looked at him curiously. He took up a piece of chalk and wrote on the board. “Democracy has failed because ___.”
A collective sigh rippled across the room. Several students stood up and left. One who remained shouted out, “This is a literature class, not poli sci!”
Padraig scanned the room, not sure where to look. “Write it in rhyme,” he said sharply. Then he plopped back into his seat and took up his book again.
Most of the students left. But a respectable number remained. After all, there were only so many literature classes that fulfilled their course requirements. So they dutifully typed up their responses to the prompt and emailed them to the course email where a TA would manage it. That TA was Mia Díaz, a doctoral student scheduled to defend her dissertation that spring. As the Head TA, Mia printed out each of the two dozen responses. She brought them to Padraig’s office.
“I took a first read and typed up my notes,” she said, placing a large stack of papers in his inbox.
“That was kind of you, thank you,” Padraig said.
Mia paused for a moment with her hand on the stack, as if there was something she wanted to add. He waited, and so for a moment, the two merely locked eyes in silence. Padraig had hired Mia, but he did not really know her outside her impeccable credentials in the department. Now, staring right at her, he noticed what wonderful eyes she had, like gold-flecked almonds. Their connection lasted only a moment when Mia tilted her head and snorted at her awkwardness before hurrying out.
Alone in his office, unable to use his typewriter, unwilling to use the computer, Padraig could not help but start reading the papers. The answers to his prompt were uninspiring–mostly about Trump, a few about corporations, one about Jews (he should probably flag that student). Six of them were actually written in rhyme, which prompted unusual word choices like mugwump and breast pump in one set, and Haitian and gyration in the other. He flitted through them, finally coming to the last.
It surprised him to see the last page signed with Mia’s name. She wasn’t meant to submit the prompt—she was the Head TA, not a student—but she had written a response anyway, in clean Courier, double-spaced, stapled at a precise right angle.
He read it slowly, expecting critique, sarcasm, maybe a sideways dig at his melancholy. Instead, it began simply:
“The premise is flawed. Democracy has not failed. It has faltered, yes. But failure is final, and we are not finished.”
She told the story of her grandfather, a journalist in Caracas, who was arrested in 2008 for publishing an exposé on oil contracts. Her mother fled with Mia—then ten years old—carrying only a bag of clothes and a book of Argentine poetry that had belonged to Mia’s grandfather. The two crossed into Colombia on foot. A church sponsored their asylum petition. They spent a year in Fresno living above a laundromat.
“My mother voted for the first time in a school gymnasium. She put on her special lipstick. She cried when she pressed the button. I asked her why. She said, ‘Because I matter here.’”
She ended by summing up the nation as a poem in the minds of the people, never finished.
Padraig sat still, the pages trembling slightly in his hands. He exhaled. He couldn’t tell if it was envy, admiration, or shame that had gripped him—likely all three. For a brief moment, he felt the crust of his cynicism loosen. It did not fall away entirely, but it shifted enough to let some light through.
He turned to his desk.
The Underwood was blocked in by the docking station, now humming faintly like a cat with too much self-satisfaction. He hesitated, then flipped open the laptop. It flickered awake, ready and blank.
He opened a Word document to begin his poem. “Poem for Washington’s Demisemiseptcentennial,” he began, typing the word across the page. He hit enter. And then, without intending it, an AI poem appeared:
Between the rain and cedars came
The canvas-stretched, the oxen-pulled,
The pioneers, on paths
Hoof-scored, wheel-rutted,
Lost, but for Old Athens in their bones,
And talk of right, of reason, and the weather.
Then, with hands bloodied by blisters,
They raised a new Olympia,
Fresh temples for the Salish Sea.
The Cascades bellow: is it true?
The cedars whisper: is it folly?
And democracy, blind as a cataract sky,
Rains down.
“Oh, shit,” Padraig said, staring at the screen. He sat for a moment. Then he typed his name beneath it.
That evening, he showed the poem to Cassie. “I call it ‘New Olympia’,” he said.
“It’s great,” she said. “I knew you could do it.”
Morgan felt the same way when Padraig relayed it by phone. “It doesn’t rhyme,” was his only criticism, but Padraig felt it was pro forma. Morgan was never fully satisfied.
CHAPTER 5
The success of ‘New Olympia’ marked a turning point for Padraig and technology. He now routinely let the computer write his poems. And the governor called on him more than ever—for ribbon-cuttings, expos, and banquets. He found himself lauding the Milk and Greater Lactose Trade Association (“O mighty mother, whose generous teat / feeds all”), the Annual Asphalt Symposium (“Black-laced ribbons / binding farm to city, / friend to friend”), and the Yakima Valley Irrigation Expo (“Hard-furrowed flow / that raises Eden / from the wilderness”). But none of it touched the pit in his stomach—the hollow certainty that he was singing praises for a dead democracy and a denuded heaven.
Late one night, with the campus quiet and Cassie asleep at home, Padraig sat alone in his office, bathed in the blue light of his new screen. He had typed into the chat: “What would Graham Greene do if he lost faith in democracy?” The AI paused—he imagined it pondering with a cigarette—and then returned with a bulleted list:
- Begin an affair.
- Travel to a country on the brink of collapse.
- Confess to a priest.
- Write a masterpiece.
- Repeat steps 1–4 in various order.
Padraig stared at the first item. “Begin an affair.” The next morning, he asked Mia to lunch.
They met at the café on 6th Avenue, one of the few places with cloth napkins and a quiet atmosphere, where the students wouldn’t go. He told her it was to discuss her dissertation, which was only partly a lie. Over avocado tartines and mint tea, he asked about her chapter on exile in the Latin American novel. Her voice held him—confident, lilting, newly certain of her argument. He interrupted her just once, to say: “You’re brilliant, you know.”
Mia blushed and looked down, but she didn’t correct him. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. He reached across the table. Their hands did not quite touch.
The affair unfolded like a novella: furtive glances in faculty lounges, text messages with too many ellipses, long talks in his office, the door cracked just enough. He felt younger, freer. The poems came back. So did a half-forgotten spring in his step. Even his hemorrhoid, mysteriously, quieted.
CHAPTER 6
Morgan called again, more chipper than usual. “You’re trending,” he said. “The poem’s gone modestly viral. You know how rare that is for state-sanctioned verse?”
Padraig grunted. “Is that good?”
“It is if you like staying poet laureate. Look, the Governor’s got you on the docket for three more events. Don’t say no. He thinks you’ve found your voice.”
Padraig hung up, wondering whether that voice was even his anymore.
He met Mia again in the spare office in the Department basement, the one with no windows and the broken lock. When they had finished, and Padraig was tucking in his shirt with habitual care, he said, “It’s funny. In the nineteenth century, this kind of thing would’ve had rules. Secrecy, of course, but also a kind of dignity. Like a form of tutorship–one generation to another.” He looked to Mia who appeared to flinch at his comment. She was silent, sitting on the edge of the desk and slowly closing her blouse. “You’re awfully quiet,” he tried. “Second thoughts?”
She looked up at him then, and her eyes were mournful. “No,” she said. “I think I’ve had them already.”
He gave a soft chuckle. “Well, it’s not like anyone’s getting hurt.”
She flinched again. “Actually, you don’t get to say that.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it. She stood, buttoned the last of her blouse, and brushed past him without another word. The door clicked shut behind her, and Padraig was left staring at the chair where she’d sat.
That night, over dinner, Cassie asked him, casually, mid-bite. “Did you enjoy The Seagull?
Padraig’s fork hovered mid-air. He lowered it. “The Seagull? The play?”
Cassie’s stare was relentless. Padraig felt as if she was boring through his shirt. “I saw the matinee ticket in your pocket,” she said, “when I was doing laundry.”
Padraig’s face turned red. “Oh, I, uh—went alone. Wanted to see if Chekhov still held up.”
“Did he?” she asked, staring at him over her wine glass.
“Only just,” Padraig muttered. He squirmed a little in his seat.
CHAPTER 7
Over the next week, Padraig was troubled by Mia’s distance–the casual meetings that he used to look forward to all dried up. Her normal route, which led her past his office daily, had changed for some reason. At the Wednesday TA meeting, she sat on the other end of the conference room. She stopped responding to his texts.
At the end of the week, Mia dropped off another stack of papers, setting them on his desk like she had when they first locked eyes. But now she set them down coolly and left without a word. He found, clipped to the last paper, a single handwritten note in her familiar script: “It wasn’t the attention I minded. It was the implication that my talent needed it.”
CHAPTER 8
Padraig decided to give Déjà Vu another try, but when he arrived, Claudius had cleared the front window and put up a handwritten sign: Closing Soon – Everything Must Go. Padraig walked in to find Claudius seated, thinner than usual, and wrapped in an old Pendleton. “It’s the lungs,” he explained, tapping his chest. “Doc says I’ve got a season left. Maybe two if I quit cigars.”
“I didn’t know,” Padraig said.
“Most people don’t. And that’s fine. People ought to die the way they lived, mostly ignored.”
Padraig tried to laugh, but it caught in his throat.
When he returned home, smelling of dust and old-growth cedar, Cassie was already in bed, reading on her Kindle. She didn’t ask where he’d been. He didn’t volunteer. They lay in a silence that had become familiar.
But as he turned off the light, she spoke softly, without looking up. “You should see someone.”
He grunted. “About what?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re looking for from the past, but it’s not going to be at Claudius’s shop.”
Padraig rolled onto his side, away from her.
She leaned over and turned the light back on. He turned his head toward her, blinking.
“If you can’t come to me for help,” she said quietly, “then it won’t end well, Padraig.”
He said nothing.
She clicked off the light again, and he turned back to his side.
PART III: THE UNWINDING
CHAPTER 9
Padraig arrived at the Dean’s office already sweating through his collar. He hadn’t slept or eaten. He suspected—he knew, actually—that someone had reported him. But he held out hope that it had come in the form of a misunderstanding, or a confidential memo, or perhaps a gentle whisper passed among tenured colleagues, the kind he could brush away.
Dean Rose closed the door behind him, a little more firmly than usual. Her desk was clean. It was too clean. She had prepared for a serious moment.
“Sit,” she said. She didn’t ask.
Padraig sat, clutching his battered portfolio case like it might contain a parachute.
“I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer honestly,” she began. “Are you having sex with your graduate student?”
Padraig flinched. He had hoped for euphemism. A situation. An entanglement. But no, Dean Rose had opted for the prosecutorial.
“I—” he started, then pivoted. “It’s not what it looks like.” His ears burned. “It wasn’t predatory,” he offered, and even as he said it, he felt the word curdle in his mouth.
Dean Rose’s hand slapped the table, and Padraig lost his hold on his case. “It is predatory when a professor enters into a romantic relationship with a student whose academic advancement depends on his favor. It is a singular definition of predatory.”
Padraig only nodded sheepishly.
The dean stood and walked to the window, arms crossed tightly over her chest. “Mia is not filing a complaint. She will defend her dissertation next week, and I intend to get her a teaching position as soon as possible.” She turned to look at Padraig again. “You’re not going to be in the way.”
Padraig looked at her with confusion. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying it’s time to resign. You’ll be given the option of early retirement. If you take it quietly, the university will describe it as a personal leave.”
Padraig gripped the edge of the chair. “Tabitha. Please.”
“No,” was all she said, turning her gaze back to the manicured quad outside her window.
He left the office with a signed letter in his leather case and a silence ringing in his ears. He avoided eye contact with the admin staff and the adjuncts pretending not to notice. His Underwood was still in his office, boxed now, surrounded by the remnants of thirty years in the classroom. There were two empty banker boxes on his chair. Even James knew, apparently.
He began to pack things up slowly, wrapping the first editions in old syllabi. When he had cleared the space around his desk, he stopped and stared at the laptop. Its blue light blinked steadily—patient, unjudging.
He sat.
The chat window was already open. “How can I help?” it asked.
Padraig cracked his knuckles. “What would Graham Greene do when the affair fails?” he typed.
The answer came at once: “Kill yourself.”
He blinked. That was it, lifted straight from The Heart of the Matter. It was unapologetic in its clarity.
He slammed the lid shut and stood up. He gathered his coat and case, leaving the rest. He passed his colleagues without a nod, crossing the quad in a daze. Tulips were blooming in the beds by the administration building. “Breeding lilacs out of the dead land,” he quoted to himself. “Dead land, dead land,” and then, “Dead man.”
The phrase repeated itself, mutating, as he marched to his car, drove with knuckles clenched, and pulled into the lot at Antique Row. He slammed the door of his Volvo and strode into Déjà Vu.
Claudius looked up from the case he was clearing out, a mammy jar in one hand and duster in the other. “You okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” Padraig said quickly. “You still sell antique firearms, right?”
Claudius raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Of course. Follow me.” He put down the jar and duster and led Padraig to a locked room with cases of guns, glass doors showing rows of black powder muskets and heavy birding guns.
Padraig nervously scanned the room and hurried over to a low case of various handguns. He pointed to a black revolver that looked trim and effective. “This one,” he said.
Claudius hurried over and unlocked the case and removed the revolver. “The Webley. Good choice. The Empire Maker. Standard issue to British officers from 1887 to 1963. This one came off a Rhodesian fellow I knew a few years back. Definitely saw some action in the Bush War.” As they looked down at it, Claudius’s thumb pulled back a latch and the revolver folded open, exposing a naked cylinder, which still held two rounds inside.
“It’s loaded?” Padraig asked incredulously.
Claudius clamped it shut as if to hide the evidence. “If that’s how it comes, that’s how I sell it.”
“And I can buy it now? No waiting period?”
“It’s an antique,” Claudius answered indirectly.
Padraig wondered at that. The Rhodesian Bush War hardly seemed on the same level as a pioneer-era musket, but pedantry had to yield to the moment.
“I’ll take it.” He handed over several bills to Claudius and hurried away.
“Your change? Your receipt?” Claudius called to him.
Padraig only stopped briefly to turn and bow slightly. “Thank you, Claudius. You have been a true friend.”
He drove out to a point above the city with a view of Mount Rainier’s peaks. He pulled out the pistol and checked its canister for good measure then cradled it in his lap. He felt he should say something pithy in that moment. The epigraph from the Waste Land came to him, naturally: “The horror! the horror!” But Hollywood coopted it. He felt his jaw tighten in frustration. His hemorrhoid distracted his thoughts again. “Oh, fuck it,” he said at last, and then he shot himself.
CHAPTER 10
Mia stood at the front of the classroom. The numbers had not really shrunk with the death of Professor Ó Maolagáin. After his first lecture, which some students understood to be a breakdown, the numbers had already collapsed. Now that Mia had taken over the class, there were even a few late additions of students interested in a new voice. She was nervous, of course, but she strode to the chalkboard. In one quick swipe, she cleared T.S. Eliot’s name from the board. In the dusty smudge, she wrote in large letters, Alfonsina Storni.
She opened the well-worn copy of poetry, her grandfather’s book she had carried from Venezuela. For a moment, her mind returned to Caracas and breakfast with her grandfather whose pipe smoke permeated everything. And while she ate her arepas, he recited from his poetry book.
She could still smell the smoke of his pipe when she recited the poem to the class, first in its native Spanish, closing her eyes from time to time before she opened them to the attentive eyes of the students–her own now. She now translated it, doing her best to keep its rhythm: “I am like the she-wolf / I broke with the flock / And I went to the mountain / Tired of the plain.”