Carthage (26 page)

Included also was Chantelle Rios’s letter of recommendation, extravagant with praise for
my sister and my friend Sabbath McSwain
. Thoughtfully if not altogether accurately Chantelle had indicated that Sabbath had been a “lab technician” in her psychology lab at the university and that, at Females Without Borders
,
she’d helped with “crucial” administrative tasks; Sabbath McSwain was a “zealous, tireless, idealistic & 100 % reliable” worker whom Dr. Hinton would not regret hiring for such a “sensitive & confidential” position.

Also with the letter was a list of Sabbath’s paltry minimum-wage jobs—clerk, kitchen worker, etc.—and two pages, stapled together, of photocopied transcripts of courses and grades issued by the registrar of the State University of Florida at Temple Park.

Just faintly smudged, all the grades were A and A--. All had been issued to
Sabbath McSwain, Continuing Education School.

The Investigator peered at the photocopied transcripts as if, just possibly, they were forged documents.

Which they were
not.

“You don’t have a B.A. degree, I gather?”

The hot wave of feeling came over her again, a sensation like angry nausea. She hoped that the little blue vein in her right temple wasn’t visibly beating.

“Many things I don’t have, Dr. Hinton. A degree is one of them.”

The Investigator laughed. This was a good answer.

So far as she’d been able to gather, Cornelius Hinton had several distinguished degrees—Harvard, Cambridge University, Columbia University. He’d written a number of books published by academic presses on obscure topics in semantics, social psychology, cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind. His
Text/Subtext/Encoded “Meaning”: An Existential Theory of Semantics
(Oxford University Press, 1979) was his most acclaimed academic book, that had won an award from the National Academy of Science; since that time, his interests seemed to have shifted elsewhere, and if he continued to publish it was under another name or names. At the Institute, he was a prominent name and yet an elusive figure who was invariably “on leave”—he hadn’t taught his popular undergraduate course “An Anatomy of American Civilization” in years, and his graduate seminars on obscure subjects (“Charles Sanders Peirce: Semiotics & Visionary Madness”) were limited to a small, select number of graduate students. Hinton was the most coveted of dissertation advisors, as he was likely to be the most absent of advisors—Chantelle claimed that there were individuals writing dissertations under his guidance who had not seen the man, face-to-face, in years. Hinton had come to prefer emails to personal conferences and had acquired a distaste for “copious hard copy” that took up too much room on his desktop and in his life. His preferred way of professional academic reading had become, he’d said,
scrolling.

Behind the Investigator was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase crammed with books both horizontal and vertical, in no discernible order—semantics, linguistics, political philosophy, novels by Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Willa Cather and William Faulkner; oversized books of drawings by Käthe Kollwitz, George Grosz, Ben Shahn, and (unexpectedly) Saul Steinberg; books of photographs by Mathew Brady, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, and Bruce Davidson; David Hume’s
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
and Thomas Hobbes’s
Leviathan
beside Noam Chomsky’s
Problems of Knowledge and Freedom,
Frantz Fanon’s
The Wretched of the Earth,
Dostoyevsky’s
The Insulted and Injured,
John Rawls’s
A Theory of Justice,
Peter Singer’s
Animal Liberation
and a vivid-red paperback anthology titled
Striking Back: Animal Rights Activism for the 21st Century.
On a shelf with Aristotle’s
Politics
and Descartes’s
Meditations
was a slender yellow book—
The Art of Paradox: Zeno of Elea.

The Investigator saw the Intern staring past his shoulder, turned and looked at the shelf—“Which of these are you interested in?
Zeno of Elea
?”

“No.”

“No—you’re not?”

The Intern shook her head, no. Quickly now looking from the bookcase to the Investigator who was regarding her with a quizzical expression.

“No one knows much about ‘Zeno of Elea.’ He was a contemporary of Socrates and very like Socrates, essentially. They were men who provoked others to
think
—in that way they made enemies.”

The Intern continued to stare at the Investigator’s desktop.

Her eyelids were lowered, impassive. Moisture filled her eyes but did not spill over onto her cheeks.

Staring at the Investigator’s hands which were narrow, long-fingered—a man’s hands yet graceful, with short-trimmed nails. And the star-shaped silver ring on the right hand, that looked like a talisman.

The Investigator returned to the subject of the interview.

“I’ve had several assistants—‘interns’—in the past. Each worked out very well, once we understood each other. Basically I am looking for a trustworthy and reliable person. I am somewhat impractical-minded—I forget things, misplace things—rarely do I actually
lose
things, because my intern will find them for me—that may be her greatest challenge! I’m not looking for an intellectual—I’m certainly not looking for an ‘original’ or ‘creative’ personality for whom working for another is a mere sideline. I’m looking for an individual who will, in a sense,
belong to me
and will not resist me—my assignments, I mean. And these will be exciting assignments! And risky, at times. So I need a fearless intern, yet not a foolhardy intern. An intern who scrupulously follows directions, anticipates problems, and solves them without involving
me.
An intern who is clear-minded and articulate but who speaks very little—as if each word costs her. (My first intern chattered so much, meaning to be ‘charming,’ I warned her that I would dock from her check a dollar-a-word for all words that were inconsequential. She caught on, quickly!) Particularly I am looking for an intern who draws no attention to herself—who can slip into places in which I’d be detected at once. I’m not looking to be ‘charmed’—I’ve had enough of being ‘charmed,’ believe me. The only seductions practiced in my vicinity will be my own—my ‘seductions’ of my subjects, to get them to talk imprudently, and not in their own best interests. An intern must be alert to the quagmire of ‘transference’—as in a psychoanalysis—and I never encourage any sort of ‘confessing.’ The intern will not call me ‘Cornelius’—(in fact, that dowdy old name isn’t my actual name nor, at the present time, my
nom de guerre
)—but ‘Dr. Hinton’—or ‘sir’—will do. The intern will not fall in love with me—even in fantasy. Or imagine that I am her father, still less her grandfather. We have work to do which I consider urgent work, exposing the sick underbelly of the American soul—if you’ll allow a surreal twist of speech—and so we may have to take risks. We must be impersonal as missiles, and we must be efficient.
I do not give a damn about the intern’s inner life
.”

The Intern smiled, uncertainly. Had she confided to the Investigator that she had no
inner life
? She had.

“Ms. McSwain—‘Sabbath.’ Tell me, do you respect the law?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Well, I’d have to ask—which law? Is there a single, singular
law
?”

The Investigator nodded approvingly. “Good! I like your skepticism. I like even that prissy little way you curl your lip—‘Is there a single, singular
law
?’ I have here”—quickly, almost abashedly, yet surely boastfully, the Investigator lowered his head, indicated a part amid snowy-white hair on the left side of his head—“a commemorative scar from a cop’s billy club, the ‘siege of Chicago 1968,’ to suggest the brutality of the
law
. So I take
law
with a grain of salt, indeed.” The Intern had a fleeting view of a startling zipper-track of serrated scalp—then the flowing-white hair, a testament to masculine vanity so refined as to approach abnegation, obscured the old, bitter hurt like a caress.

“You look like one who has lived—not ‘outside’ the law but, in some way, orthogonal to it. Is this correct?”

Orthogonal
. She took a plunge, guessing: parallel? perpendicular? proximate but irrelevant?

“Yes, sir.”

“Always good to ask ‘which law’—‘law for
who
.’ Sometimes it’s a moral imperative to break such a law—a more noble imperative to work to abolish it. So I have a criminal record, of a kind—not as ‘Cornelius Hinton,’ however. And you, Ms. McSwain?”

“And me—what?”

“Do you have a criminal record?”

“N-no . . .”

“You haven’t been a political activist? Like Chantelle and her friends? ‘Code Pink’?”

“No.”

“And in all your travels—your years of drifting about Florida—vague as they were made to sound—you were never, as it’s said, ‘busted’?”

“No. I was not.”

The Intern laughed. She wondered if she should feel offended, or flattered.

“Quite innocent and naïve people find themselves arrested, often,” the Investigator said, “if for instance a Republican convention comes to town, and the local PD turns out its mounted storm troopers. Especially people of color, and people of ambiguous sexual identity. So my question shouldn’t strike you as rude.”

The Intern was sure,
Sabbath McSwain
had no criminal record, she’d died so young.

She’d never typed the name in any computer. Out of superstition she wouldn’t have wished to research the name any more than she’d have wished to research her old, lost name—the self she’d been
back there
.

She had no curiosity about the past, to the degree to which it touched upon her. An impersonal past, the “historical” past—social, political, cultural—this interested her far more than her own past which was befouled like a summer sweater of some light, delicate material dragged through a mud puddle.

The Investigator was saying: “So—would you be willing, if necessary, to ‘break the law’—to ‘trespass’—even to ‘steal’? By which I don’t mean any sort of common theft of property, but evidence that has been hidden away from the public, which we might require to expose deviousness and fraud.”

“Y-yes, sir.”

“You’d be willing to go, with me, into unpleasant places, even dangerous places, at my request? And if you were detected, I couldn’t help you.”

“Y-yes, sir. I mean—yes. I would be willing. I would try.”

She liked it, being asked to
trespass
. She liked the idea of an outlaw life, in which deceit in the service of righteousness was the prevailing logic.

A subversive life for which she would be paid. A
life.

“And salary. Have we discussed ‘salary’?”

As if casually the Investigator quoted a weekly sum several times what the Intern might have expected.

The Intern smiled, uncertainly.

“Well—would that salary
do
?”

The Intern smiled yet more uncertainly. Was the proper answer—
yes?

“Know what I like about you, Sabbath McSwain? You don’t waste breath. You take up damned little space.”

The interview seemed to be winding down. Perhaps the interview was over.

The Investigator had begun to glance toward his computer screen, as if distracted by new email. The Intern wondered if she’d been dismissed? Rejected?
Had she missed something crucial
?

“I—I should leave now, Dr. Hinton? Is that—what comes next?”

Very clumsy this was. The Intern could think of no other words.

So often she went for days without speaking to anyone, at length. And seeing those few people whom she knew, she was likely to duck away from them, in a kind of shame.

The Investigator said, “Yes. Good. You can leave now of course. But return tomorrow at seven-fifteen
A.M.
”

“Return tomorrow?”

“Yes. How otherwise would you work as my intern, if you aren’t on-site?”

“Do you mean—I’m hired?”

“I think I mean—you will do for the time being.”

The Intern stood, stunned and dazed. The Investigator more languidly stood, looming above her. He did not see her to the door. He did not mean to be gallant—that would not be a feature of their relationship.
Truly he did not want a personal connection,
the Intern understood.

Yet clumsily she thrust out her hand. A child’s hand, a boy’s hand—with ragged nails, dirt-edged nails, bitten-nails. The cuff of her plaid shirt was stained, the toes of her boys’ winter shoe-boots were stained. The Investigator shook the Intern’s hand with a perturbed little smile, not rising to the level of exasperation, not rising to the level of an indulgence, fleeting, kindly, to send her on her way out of his office and out of the Institute that, positioned at an edge of the university campus that fronted a busy avenue, suggested its peripheral and orthogonal relation to the campus, much of its funding from private sources. Outside, the Intern walked quickly away. Began to run, was running in a light-autumn rain out of an opaque sky, hearing herself laughing, an inward-laughing, not-audible, rapidly blinking in the rain that cooled her warm face—
You will do for the time being. I think I mean. You!

THE INTERN’S FIRST
TASK
under the Investigator’s tutelage was to master the “crafty art” of photographing an (ignorant, oblivious) subject from a distance of just a few feet.

“Observe. From yesterday.”

The Investigator invited the Intern to look at the screen—large, flat, state-of-the-art—of his desk computer.

She was astonished to see there eighteen pictures labeled
MCSWAIN
—her?

She winced to see herself head-on, innocently unsuspecting, with that little frowning-furrow in her forehead, and what the Investigator had called the prissy little set of her mouth. The photos were slightly out of focus but unmistakably
Sabbath McSwain.