Tim Horvath - Understories

“I know about as much as you.”

“I don’t know whether to mention Homeland Security today. I don’t want to scare anyone.”

Oh but you do , I thought. “That’s entirely your call.”

“Maybe I’ll hold it in reserve.” I can’t make out his eyes in the dim light, can’t discern whether he is waiting for some kind of response.

My feelings about Book Seven of Plato’s Republic are likely slightly more virulent than even the average umbrologist’s.

“Motherfucking Plato,” I was telling Lew Dorris one May. My best students were graduating and going on to Nantucket and New York, one to be an architect for the summer hautes monde , the other to serve as a loading-dock clerk. It was depressing. “Fuck motherfucking Plato. Far as I’m concerned, he can take it gangbang-style from Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus one-two-three.”

Lew was a fiendish player of darts. We’d completed a round or two, and Lew’s feather shadows were clustering around the bull’s-eye, forming a penumbra, where mine were lost in floorboards and flopping miserably off a vintage Guinness pelican beak.

“Ease up, Glenn” is what he was saying. “Get one near the board.”

“No, but I mean. .” I stammered. “Take Plato out of the picture, look at what we get. Respectability, Lew, that’s what we get. The respect we got coming. Galileo, motherfucker,” I said. “Galileo knew the value of a shadow.”

Each time I squeezed a dart before the furrows I could feel in my brow, he’d shrink back, watching people in the vicinity nervously. “Glenn,” he said. “If it isn’t Plato it’s someone else. People aren’t made to love shadows. It’s that simple.”

“Screw that,” I said. “We are made to love them. Hello? Three-dimensional vision?” Hearing myself saying it, I felt foolish: I’m going to remind Lew Dorris about 3-D vision.

“Glenny,” he said. “It’s the end of the semester. Take some time off. Go to Orlando.”

I knew Dorris was speaking figuratively — he knew I had neither a family nor a desire to cavort with giant cartoon replicas. For a moment, it crossed my mind that roller-coaster shadow in Florida sun could be manna, the theme park itself a sort of Rorschach of America.

“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.