Rebecca Makkai - The Hundred-Year House

“It’ll be like Notorious !” Miriam said. “Only we won’t get caught like Ingrid Bergman.” Seeing how her hands flew around her hair and her nose flared out, how her whole face was pink and bright, Doug wondered if she’d actually been depressed all summer. Those other times she’d seemed happy, like standing on the counter that first day with those plates, it must have been something fake. It was nothing like this.

Doug finally shook his head. “Zee would never forgive me,” he said. “Not for going after the files, but — I mean, Gracie would kick us out.” He could imagine his mother-in-law smiling thinly, saying that now that he’d found a new career in espionage, he could surely afford his own home.

“It’s five weeks away,” Miriam said. “You have time to decide. Don’t say no just yet.”

When they finally disbanded, Doug felt they should all put their hands in a heap and chant something, like a field hockey team. But he let it end with Miriam heading down the beach for pebbles and he and Leland trudging all the way back to town for coffee.

“You jackass,” Leland said as they crossed the train tracks. “I can’t fucking believe you.”

“What?”

He shook his head in a rueful way that he must have stood in front of the mirror and practiced, a poet’s astonishment at the varied and exasperating world. “You rate a woman a six point five and go off about how crazy she is.”

“Oh, she has her moments. I probably didn’t do her justice.”

“That’s not what I meant. You’re in love with her.”

Doug almost ran into the guardrail. So they were starting, the inevitable assumptions. He decided to wait long enough that his answer wouldn’t seem defensive, because it wasn’t, and he needed Leland to understand that.

They were all the way across the street by the time he said, “I am sincerely not.”

“I’m just saying, the only reason I can think to sell a lovely person like that so short is that maybe you’re fighting something.”

“Or maybe she’s really crazy. You walk in when she’s working, and she looks like a homeless person. She’s got pencils behind both ears, and pins sticking from her mouth, hair frizzed out. Her pupils are fully dilated.”

“Okay, sure. Sure. But let me ask you this: Why do you keep walking in when she’s working?”

Doug considered punching Leland in the face, but decided against it.

As Zee sorted handouts before class, the talk grew shrill in the corner. “It was right there on the screen,” Meghan Dwyer said. A smart, sweet girl who could actually write. Everyone was turned toward her. “And I wouldn’t say it was underage stuff. But it was graphic. I know some people are picturing just, like, a topless woman leaning on a car. But this was, like—” she looked around, saw Zee immersed in her papers, and mouthed the words “— butt-fucking .”

Zee wondered, in brief amazement, if it had all been true, if she’d simply set things in motion. But no, this was her own creation, her own monster. She had willed this into being.

—

Near the end of class, Dev Kapoor raised his hand, a look on his face like he was trying to fend off a headache. He said, “How come ghosts are always from the past? I mean, why are they never from the future?” The class snickered. Zee suspected his peers had a different impression of Dev than she’d gotten from his workmanlike papers.

“Go on,” she said.

“A ghost from the future would have a lot more at stake. Ghosts from the past are always in the Hamlet model, right? Like, remember me and avenge my death. But a ghost from the future is going to be desperate. If things don’t go right he won’t be born.”

“Time doesn’t work that way,” Fran Leffler said, and then they all started in, telling him he’d watched too many movies.

“Maybe I don’t mean a ghost. More like a spirit or a force. But anyway, my point is, a ghost from the future wouldn’t be scary, right?”

Zee said, “So we’re afraid of the undead, but not the unborn.”

Sarah Bonheur thrust her hand definitively into the air and didn’t wait to be called on. “ A Christmas Carol ,” she said. “By Charles Dickens. The ghost of Christmas Future is the scariest of all.”

Dev said, “Oh. Right,” and collapsed back in his chair.

But Antwon Haynes picked up the ball. “That’s an exception. Maybe it’s like what we’re afraid of isn’t death, but the past . No one walks by a crime scene the very next day and feels a ghost. It takes twenty years, right?”

They were on to something, Zee thought. We aren’t haunted by the dead, but by the impossible reach of history. By how unknowable these others are to us, how unfathomable we’d be to them.

She started writing on the board.

—

Cole had been making himself scarce outside of class, so Zee was caught off guard when, as she passed his office, he stuck his head out and motioned her in. It was the first time she’d set foot there since the sabotage, but here were the same books stacked on the floor, same Post-its covering the Indiana University diploma.

“Zenobia, my dear, I need your advice,” he said. He sat on the front edge of his desk, which left Zee choosing between the student chair, three inches from Sid Cole’s crotch, and his own desk chair, inappropriate in a different way. She opted for leaning against a bookcase. “As a communist, you’re interested in intellectual freedom, no?”

“I’m not a communist, I’m a Marxist scholar.”

“Here’s my point: The administration should not be able to access the computers of tenured faculty. Let’s imagine you were looking at some Web site of a communist politician, and then you’re hauled in front of a committee. When the whole point of tenure is the freedom.”

“I’m not tenured.”

“You’ve heard what’s happening, I’m sure.”

Zee attempted to look bewildered, but he shook his head.

“You hear everything. You know what the deans ate for breakfast. You know when Blum takes a crap. And what I want to know is, when did we become afraid of sex? We ask them to read Lolita and Chaucer, but a nude picture is going to warp their minds? They’re adults !”

Zee genuinely was bewildered now, by what seemed a confession, but she reminded herself that this was just Cole, that he was the kind of man who would argue against the Dalai Lama, simply for the thrill of battle. So she said, “I think if you believe strongly in this, you should fight it, whether you did the thing or not.”

“Ha! I’m not asking your permission. What I’m wondering is this: You always have your finger on the pulse, so to speak. How many faculty do you suppose would back me?”

“It depends what you’re planning to do.”

“If I say, either you stay out of my computer or I quit my job and take this very public. How many people would support me on that?”

“You’re not asking them to quit with you.”

“No. Write letters, shave their heads.”

She picked up a little jade monkey from the shelf and felt its smooth back with her thumb. A strangely delicate object for Cole to possess. “I imagine you’d have some support. Just don’t count on all the feminists.”

“Isn’t everyone a feminist now? I thought that was the point of Women’s Studies.”

“I can probably help with the feminists.”

Despite everything, when he winked at her right then, she could see why he charmed the kids. It was so hard to get on his good side that once you got there, even under false pretenses, it felt validating, like the hard-won respect of a difficult father.