Visiting Professor (13 page)

“What language is ‘Klaf L’?” Lemuel asks the Rebbe.

“It is definitely not Hebrew, it is definitely not Yiddish. Sounds maybe Lilliputian to me.”

Rain waves excitedly. “They’re so stoked they’re holding the goddamn banner outside in,” she exclaims. “Don’t you get it?
It’s like the ‘oT redneT’ on the window of my barbershop.”

The students catch sight of something or someone and break into a roar that sounds like surf pounding a shore. They seem to
repeat two words over and over:

“Ell fauk! Ell fauk! Ell fauk!”

“L. Fucking Falk!” breathes Rain in awe.

Two buses pull up at the curb in front of the courthouse, and the defendants begin boarding them for the fifteen-mile ride
to the Backwater campus. On the street, near a white truck with “ABC” painted on its side, someone shouts, “There he is—the
one in the faded brown overcoat and the ski cap with the pom-pom!”

Disoriented, Lemuel stumbles down the steps toward the buses, only to find himself confronted by two dozen grown men aiming
an assortment of cameras at him. Other men holding long booms dangle microphones over his head. Flashbulbs explode in his
face. Lemuel, who knows a lynching party, as opposed to a reception committee, when he sees one, backpedals; traces of alarm
appear in the sudden whiteness of his normally bloodshot eyes, in the delicate lift of his brows, in the slight flaring of
his nostrils.

“What made you risk your life for a garbage dump?” someone shouts.

“How do you feel about the governor suspending work on the dump site pending a new feasibility study?”

Rain grabs Lemuel’s wrist and thrusts his arm over his head as if he has just won a heavyweight championship. “How he feels
is totally stellar,” she cries. “He comes from the country that gave the world Chernobyl. He knows what it means to drink
milk from cows raised on goddamn radioactive grass.”

“He is against poisoning the garden of God with nuclear waste,” the Rebbe puts in.

The cameras, the microphones zoom in on Lemuel.

“Is it true you’re a visiting professor at the Institute for Chaos-Related Studies?”

“What can you tell us about the relationship between chaos and death?”

“I can say you …” Lemuel starts to respond, but his voice is drowned out by journalists shouting questions. The hook on the
question mark at the end of each question snags another question. Caught up in a feeding frenzy, the journalists don’t seem
to notice the absence of answers.

“Is that a designer overcoat you’re wearing, Professor?”

“Have you ever attempted suicide before?”

“If they bring the bulldozers back, will you lie down on the ramp again?”

“He knows which side is up,” yells Rain. At her feet, Mayday senses her mistress’s excitement and responds with a nervous
fart. “If they come back,” Rain adds, “so will the visiting professor.”

“Were you aware you were being televised while you were lying on the ramp?”

“Did you realize the shot would appear on prime-time TV?”

“Eighty million Americans saw you defy death. How does it feel to be an instant hero?”

“How does it feel to attract crowds?”

“I am allegoric to crowds,” Lemuel mumbles.

“What did he say?”

“Could you repeat that?”

Before Lemuel can open his mouth, someone calls, “Can you comment on how it feels to be alive?”

“Is it true you were a leading dissident in the Soviet Union?”

Lemuel tries to slip a word in. “There is no Soviet Union anymore—”

“Can you confirm the rumor that you once lay in the path of Brezhnev’s limousine to block it from leaving the Kremlin?”

“Is it true you were arrested in Red Square for demonstrating against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?”

“Is it true you signed petitions calling on the KGB to publicly apologize for seventy years of terror?”

“I signed petitions, but I did not use my real signature—” Lemuel tries to explain, but the questions continue to drown out
his answers.

“Is there anything to the rumor that you left Russia to avoid military service?”

“What do you think of American women?”

“What do you think of American food?”

“What do you think of America?”

“Your towns, your citizens are smaller than in Russia,” Lemuel starts to reply, “though maybe they only seem smaller because
I was expecting—”

“Are you married?”

“Have you ever been unfaithful to your wife?”

“If you were to meet the President of the United States, what would you ask him?”

In a sudden lull Lemuel can clearly be heard to say, “I would ask him how one city can be more Florida than another.”

“Are you for or against the fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit?”

“Are you for or against women’s liberation?”

“Are you for or against capital punishment?”

“The socialists had their chance,” Lemuel says, “now the capitalists must be given the opportunity to—”

A television reporter turns and speaks into the camera. “The Russian immigrant who risked his life to defend the county against
nuclear pollution is definitely in favor of capital punishment.”

“Would you share your views on acid rain with us?”

“What is your opinion on busing as a way of solving racial imbalances?”

“If you buy a car, will you buy American or Japanese?”

“Do you have an opinion on the budget deficit?”

“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?”

Lemuel murmurs, “There is no Communist party anymore,” but he might as well not be there.

“Are you now or have you ever been a homosexual?”

“Is there any truth to the rumor about your testing HIV-positive?”

“If you had it to do all over again, would you do it all over again?”

“If you could re-live your life, what would you do differently?”

“If you could undo something you’ve done, what would it be?”

“If you could do something you left undone, what would it be?”

Without thinking, Lemuel blurts out words that make no sense to him. “I would say them it was me who hid the exercise manual.”
But nobody pays attention.

“How do you feel about abortion?”

“Do you plan to apply for political asylum?”

“Do you plan to apply for American citizenship?”

“Do you have any plans to run for Congress in the next election?”

“What are your academic ambitions?”

Rain pulls one of the dangling microphones down to her mouth. “He has no ambition,” she shouts into the microphone—it is a
sound bite that will make the national six o’clock news programs. “L. Falk is downwardly mobile. He wants to live and let
live in a county without radioactive garbage dumps, without serial murders, without birds choking to death on bloated rice.”

“What’s
your
name?” a reporter demands.

“R. Morgan,” Rain shouts back, “as in J. P. Morgan. In case you are not familiar with him, he had something to do with money,
which is what I want to have something to do with.”

“Would you look this way, Mr. Falk.”

“Could you gaze up at the American flag over the courthouse, Mr. Falk.”

“Can you raise his hand over his head again, Miss.”

“What is your position on legalizing drugs?”

“On protecting the ozone layer?”

“On using fossil fuels?”

“What is your position on abortion?”

“He’s already fielded that question,” a well-known anchorwoman notes.

“How do you feel about distributing free condoms in high schools?”

“I am too busy looking for pure, unadulterated—” Lemuel starts to say.

“How do you feel about doing away with the Electoral College?”

“I am
for
educa—” Lemuel starts to say.

“Thank you for the interview, Mr. Falk,” one of the journalists shouts up from the street.

“You are—” Lemuel starts to reply, but the journalists are already racing off to meet deadlines. Muttering under his breath,
he completes the sentence: “—a pack of earlobes.”

A whisper of something other than winter finds its way into Lemuel’s ear: a
breeze grazing ground that is no longer frozen, water gushing through the throat of a creek that is no longer choked with
ice, the knell of the carillon reverberating through air that no longer stings the nostrils. Confirming the beginning of the
end of winter, Lemuel discovers the single hand on Rain’s Swiss watch that tells the phase of the moon and the season leaning
against the “S” of “Spring.”

In a wistful fiction, he sees himself leaning against the “R” of “Randomness.”

Something of a celebrity now, Lemuel holds out in the apartment over the Rebbe’s for three full weeks after the trespassing
trial before packing his enormous cardboard valise, his Red Army knapsack and his duty-free shopping bag and spiriting them
into Rain’s loft. The official explanation for this change of venue is that he is on the lam from the television reporters
who besiege the Rebbe’s house day and night, who set up klieg lights outside in the hope that he will crack a window and holler
answers to their hollered questions. The real reason for the move is that he has grown accustomed to Y-jacking in the bathtub
with a female whose nakedness is more than skin-deep, to sleeping in the same bed with a Siberian night moth, to being roused
mornings by Occasional Rain murmuring “Yo!” in his ear as she coaxes exploitable erections from his drowsy flesh.

From long experience with tribulation, he wonders when the bubble will burst and the trial will begin.

The telephone in the apartment over the Rebbe’s head never stops ringing after Lemuel moves out. The Rebbe bounds up the stairs,
toppling several waist-high towers of books in his eagerness to answer the phone. Introducing himself to each caller as Lemuel’s
business agent, he jots down offers to endorse ecological laundry detergents or non-polluting oven cleaners.

“You are letting yet another lucrative opportunity slip through your callused fingers,” he scolds Lemuel when he phones in
with the day’s messages.

Lemuel pays scant attention to the Rebbe. There have been five more murders in the three weeks he has been working with the
dossiers the sheriff gave him, bringing the total number of victims to eighteen. He is obsessed with quantifying the information
in the sheriffs files, feeding bytes into his computer and devising software to test the material for randomness. Has he,
at long last, stumbled across an example of pure, albeit macabre, randomness? His heart says, Why not? His head tells him
that this seeming randomness is nothing more than the name he gives to his ignorance.

But what doesn’t he know?

“What would I do with the money?” he asks when the Rebbe nags him about the latest phone call, an offer to endorse biodegradable
underwear. “I am already rich beyond my wildest dreams. The Institute pays me two thousand U.S. dollars a month. In Petersburg,
this is worth two million rubles. When I left Russia, my monthly salary at Steklov was seven thousand, five hundred rubles.”

“In your wanderings, haven’t you stumbled across something called capitalism? With money you make more money,” cries the Rebbe.
“With more money you can serve God, you can build a yeshiva, you can spend your waking hours, your sleeping hours too, unraveling
strands of chaos in To rah.” He adds in exasperation: “I don’t understand your attitude. It is not American.”

“I am not American,” Lemuel reminds the Rebbe.

“That’s no excuse.”

With the temperature running above freezing for the third day in a row, Rain can be heard in the garage under the apartment
tuning
up an antique Harley-Davidson. Come Sunday, she revs the motor and takes Lemuel for a spin on the narrow, winding unpaved
road that meanders around the lake and through a forest of pines west of Backwater. Glued to the jump seat behind Rain, hanging
onto her with his thighs and arms, the side of his head flat against the back of her worn leather aviator’s jacket, the wind
whistling past his ears, the clouds flitting through the bare branches overhead, he experiences a curious elation … a letting
go. He feels he is moving for the first time beyond the world of chaos toward … what?

Toward something he has had no experience with, cannot quantify, much less identify.

Skirting the lake on the way back to Backwater, Rain pulls the Harley off the road, cuts the motor, strolls down to the edge
of the lake to study her reflection in the still water. “I really did get beautiful,” she observes as Lemuel comes up beside
her.

“You did not get modest,” he comments dryly.

“Hey, don’t rag on me,” Rain fires back. “A girl needs to know what she’s got going for her.”

They stretch out in the sun, which projects warmth as well as light for the first time since Lemuel’s arrival in the Promised
Land. The sound of Rain’s voice droning in his ear makes him drowsy, and he drifts into a fitful sleep. The little boy is
cringing in a corner … the faceless men wearing thick-soled, steel-toed shoes are taking apart an armoire. …

Rain shakes him awake. “You’re not going to go to sleep on me!”

“I was resting my eyes.”

“Where was I? Like when they cremate people, right? the fillings in teeth disintegrate and eat away at the layer of ozone
protecting us from the sun. The fancy name for this is the greenhouse effect.” Rain turns her head and spots a smug grin on
Lemuel’s face. “So I don’t see how you can smile about something as serious as the end of the world. I read where in ten years’
time there’ll be no more ozone, which means no more winter. The polar ice caps are already melting. If it keeps up, every
coastal city in the world will be under water.”

“How do you know so much about the greenhouse effect?”

“My ex-husband, the bird killer, grew marijuana in a greenhouse. You want some free financial advice, L. Falk—invest in companies
making rowboats, canoes, inflatable rafts, things like that. I used to
live in Atlantic City, but being a nonswimmer, I moved inland to Backwater.”

On the way home Rain stops off at the E-Z Mart and scores two jars of imported gefilte fish. Passing the checkout counters,
she gets into a long discussion with Dwayne and Shirley, her best friends in Backwater. Dwayne argues that the basic division
in the world is between the haves and the have-nots and, by extension, between the largely white, industrialized countries
in the Northern Hemisphere and the largely black, agrarian countries in the Southern Hemisphere. Shirley claims Dwayne has
never recovered from his Harvard education. The world is divided, any idiot ought to be able to see it, she says, between
males and females. Rain cracks everyone up by insisting the world is really divided into anal and oral camps. “Anyone who
thinks different is out to lunch,” she says.

“Which one are you, babe?” Dwayne asks with a leer. “Anal or oral?”

“I’ll give you an educated guess,” Rain retorts.

On the spur of the moment Rain invites them up for a pot luck supper. Shirley, chewing gum intently as she eyes Lemuel sitting
on the Harley’s jump seat in the parking lot, asks, “Is your Russian squeeze gonna hang around to party?”

“Your hard-on is showing, babe,” Dwayne taunts.

Shirley actually blushes. “Only boys get hards-on.”

“The plural of hard-on,” Dwayne informs her with a raunchy smirk, “happens to be hard-ons.”

“There he goes again,” Shirley tells Rain, “opening his fly and exposing his Harvard education.”

“Rain told me
you dudes were tight,” Lemuel says as they pull folding chairs up to the kitchen table.

“We go back a long way,” Dwayne says. “Isn’t that a fact, babe?”

Rummaging in a drawer for a church key, Rain smiles at Dwayne. “I worked as a cashier at the Mart my freshman year,” she explains
to Lemuel. “It was Dwayne here who bankrolled me when I came up with the idea of opening Tender To and cutting hair.”

“And dealing drugs,” Shirley adds mischievously.

“You go with the flow,” Rain says. “Dwayne saved my butt—he cosigned the lease and loaned me the money to buy the barber’s
chair Shirley found in the junk shop in Rochester.”

Dreaming away on her blanket, Mayday twitches in her sleep.

“She’s chasing butterflies,” Rain explains.

Lemuel says moodily, “Me also, I chase small winged creatures in my sleep. Along with pure, unadulterated rainbows.”

Shirley pushes the jars of gefilte fish across the table to Lemuel. “I bet you thought she was swiping this stuff from the
Mart,” she tells him. “Dwayne’s the last of the bleeding hearts—he lets all his friends score.”

Lemuel remarks, “A bleeding heart can also be worn on the sleeve.”

Shirley looks puzzled. “A
what
can be worn
where?”

Lemuel turns to Dwayne. “So you knew all along Rain was scoring things from the store.”

“No skin off my nose,” Dwayne says. “I mark up everything to make up for what I lose to shoplifters.”

Rain tosses the church key to Dwayne, who opens the beers. “Hey, I told you they padded the prices,” she says.

Shirley says, “Rain likes to say we have got to shoplift every now and then to make sure supermarkets don’t profit from people
not shoplifting.” She flings an arm around Rain’s ass and gives it a squeeze. “You are something else.”

“I like you to death,” Rain laughs. She leans down and kisses Shirley lightly on the lips.

“Oh God, me too,” Shirley says with an awkward giggle.

Lemuel serves the gefilte fish. Rain deals matzos as if they were cards. “You being of Jewish persuasion,” she tells Lemuel,
“I thought you’d dig this.”

“It comes from Israel,” Shirley puts in brightly.

“As long as you were scoring gefilte fish, you could have scored horseradish,” Dwayne complains.

After supper Lemuel excuses himself to go into the spare bedroom and feed more bytes from the sheriffs files into his desktop
workstation. The others drift into the living room. Shirley drapes herself over the back of the couch and asks Rain for a
hit. Rain pulls a hollowed-out copy of
The Hite Report
from a shelf, opens it on the table, pushes aside the LSD tabs and packets of hash, helps herself to a joint, curls up in
front of the television set, which has a Humphrey Bogart movie on without the sound. She lights up, takes a long drag,
hands the joint to Shirley, who takes a drag and passes it on to Dwayne.

“I don’t get it, babe,” Dwayne says to Rain in an undertone.

“What don’t he get?” Shirley asks Rain. “What don’t you get, angel?” Shirley asks Dwayne.

Dwayne toys with the silver ring in his ear. “I don’t get Lem and her. I see what’s in it for him, you’d need to be blind
not to. But what’s in it for Rain?”

“Lem’s a cutie-pie,” Shirley says. “I’ll take sloppy seconds any time.”

“He comes from a country where there’s practically no Black Plague,” Rain explains with a defiant half smile. “Also he’s innocent—when’s
the last time one of you dudes wore a bleeding heart on your sleeve? Also, he’s smarter than the three of us put together.”

“Right as Rain,” Shirley says dreamily.

“I have a last-but-not-least,” Rain adds. “Since I’ve been rooming with him, I don’t hear drums in my ear.”

“But does he like yogurt?” Dwayne asks suggestively.

“Dwayne here sure likes yogurt,” Shirley notes. “Don’t you like yogurt, angel?”

“Rain is aware I like yogurt. Isn’t that the case, babe?”

Rain watches Lemuel, hunched over his computer, through the open doorway of the bedroom. Halfway through the second joint,
she jumps up, snaps off the television and motions for Dwayne and Shirley to put the show on the road.

Shirley pouts. “You’re not gonna go and kick us out, are you? It’s still today.”

“I was sorta hoping we could crash, babe,” Dwayne announces.

“I was hoping to check out the merchandise,” Shirley, by now pleasantly high, admits.

“Take a rain check,” Rain says.

“We get off on Rain’s checks, don’t we, angel?” Shirley coos.

“Rain’s checks don’t bounce,” Dwayne says with a knowing smile.

Rain supplies them with a couple of joints for the road. Collapsing onto the couch, she kicks off a shoe and caresses Mayday
with her toes. After a while she calls out, “Like being around you makes me feel inadequate, right? Can you hear me, L. Fucking
Falk? I mean, I know beans compared to you. You know so much you even know what you don’t know. Where’d you learn all that
stuff about chaos and randomness?”

Lemuel ambles into the room, raises his brows when he notices the hollowed-out book filled with capsules and packets and joints.
“What happened to Dwayne and Shirley?”

“They packed it in.” She regards Lemuel suspiciously. “So like how does someone become a
Homo chaoticus?”

Lemuel sinks onto the couch next to her and rubs his eyes, which are redder than usual. “I picked up everything I know on
the subway,” he explains. “I had a professor, his name was Litzky, he was an innovator, he lived, he breathed chaos before
the rest of the world knew it was a science. He was expelled from Moscow University for antiparty tendencies after someone
found a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s
First Circle
in his desk drawer. That happened in mid-term. Professor Litzky continued giving his lectures on the subway. He would phone
up his students, name a Metro stop, specify a time. We all crowded into the car, the doors closed, Litzky would start talking
about fractals as a way of seeing infinity, about the infinite cascades of bifurcations, about intermittencies, about periodicities.
He would lecture for twelve or fifteen stops, some of us scribbling drunken notes as the subway lurched down the tracks. We
would slip envelopes filled with rubles into the enormous pockets of his overcoat while he lectured. Scholarly articles written
by Litzky were never published, books were out of the realm of possibility, but even today he is thought of as the father
of Soviet chaos.”