Michael Chabon - A Model World And Other Stories

“Never mind. Forget it.” He gave his head a shake. “Tell me about this Ross thing,” he said, and lit the pipe. As he inhaled, the professor raised his eyebrows, and lowered them as he blew out. He and Levine passed the pipe in near-silence for several minutes. The room filled with miniature cumulonimbus clouds. Levine looked at the titles of the books on the shelves without registering them until his vacant gaze fell upon a slender black spine at the upper left-hand corner of the bookcase, unmarked, exactly the same height and thickness as the spine of Dr. Kemp’s book.

“Oh my,” said Levine, exhaling a thick plume.

“What?” said Professor Baldwin. He looked toward the bookcase as if there might be a large spider or rodent crawling across it.

“Were you a student of Dr. Kemp?” Levine could see Baldwin, a little heavier, with hair, standing beside his brave mentor, frost on their faces, against a background of auks and green icebergs. They had been inseparable.

“Dr. Kemp?” Baldwin frowned. “I never heard of him.”

This did little to reassure Levine. Even if it were not Dr. Kemp’s book on this particular bookshelf, it might as well have been — the book was out there somewhere, waiting; he was going to be found out. He was not in the least surprised, and the sudden renascence in his heart of defeat, of the sense of failure, was almost a relief, as though he had loosened his necktie and unbuttoned his collar. There was no easy way out of the prison of his studies, and he had known this very well until yesterday. His plagiarism had been only an act of self-deception.

“It is Smith,” he said, with a feeling of great detachment from the words he spoke.

Professor Baldwin was staring intently at the face of his wristwatch and seemed not to have heard.

“It isn’t that Monsour guy,” said Levine, abandoning both of us to our fates. “I think it’s Smith, sir.”

Now the professor looked up at Levine and bit his lip. He was going through the evidence in his mind.

“You could be right,” he said. “That sounds feasible.”

He replaced the pipe and the plastic bag, carefully, then stood and steadied himself against his desk. On the screen of his computer a model world of weather slowly overheated and drowned.

“What are you going to do?” said Levine.

“I haven’t decided yet,” said Professor Baldwin. “But something. Him I’m not afraid of.” He strode to the door. “A bad student I know how to handle.”

“A bad student?” said Levine, rising with a wobble to follow Baldwin out of the cloudy room.

As he switched off the light, Baldwin smiled weakly, as though seeing that his phrase had perhaps not been appropriate.

“You know what I mean,” he said.

“Professor Baldwin,” said Levine. “What if all of my numbers came out of the Bay of Whales? That wouldn’t be good, would it?”

“That wouldn’t make any difference at all.” He stepped aside in the hall to let Levine pass. “After you,” he said.

The party was in its second hour, the bones and oily plates cleared from the table, when Mehmet Monsour was begged to demonstrate one of his famous little games. He and Jewel had done most of the talking during dinner, discussing the theatrical abilities of Bill and Luke and Clothilde and Janet, and particularly of Jewel; malt liquor made Monsour incredibly voluble, it seemed, as with each tall can he came to dominate the conversation more and more, and his stories — how I hate men who tell stories at dinner! — grew increasingly sordid and disturbing. He had been all around the world. Professor Baldwin, Levine, and I were abandoned to our disparate silences. Every time I looked at Baldwin, he was looking at me, beaming at me, really, as though he were in on some happy word of my fortunes, as though I had won some prize. I could hardly eat a thing. Levine nodded his head so intently at the things mentor and pupil were saying that I could see he wasn’t listening to a word.

“And so I simply stole it. It was not mine, and it could be of no real practical use to me — you see that,” Monsour was saying. He had gotten loud and a little gross in the course of the evening — his bathrobe was all untied and some of the crucial buttons of his pajama top had popped open — and I remembered a piece of advice my father had once given me about never drinking anything that had a number in its brand name except for Vat 69. “While on the contrary, as I look back on it, this radio was her only connection, aside from me, to the outer world. It was precious to her. When I left, she would be cut off completely, as you can see.” He shook his head at the memory of this wickedness he had practiced, but with a wistful smile, as though he had long ago forgiven himself.

“I’ve already heard that story,” said Jewel. She had also been drinking malt liquor; the continued adhesion of her sarong was in some doubt. “I told it to you, Baldwin.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember,” Professor Baldwin said, smiling at me now with perfect fondness. He turned to Mehmet Monsour. “Why don’t you tell these two about that game? That sounded like a bear .”

Oh, let’s play it,” said Jewel. She was sitting next to me, and as she said this she nudged me lightly with her left elbow. I was certain now that something unpleasant lay in store for me and certain also, for the first time, that as a person I meant very little to her. I was just another way of irritating her husband.

“It is quite simple,” said Monsour, whirling on Levine and catching him off guard. Levine sat up and folded his hands scholastically in his lap. “In fact, it is hardly a game at all. We turn out all the lamps.” He rose from the table and gathered about him the flaps of his rootin’-tootin’ bathrobe. The candle on the dinner table shed its lone light. “This is all right, Baldwin?”

“Sure it is,” said Baldwin. “Quite all right. I don’t think I’ll play, though. I’m no good at this kind of thing.”

He looked at Jewel and they blushed like a couple of lovers.

“Whatever you like. Fine.” Monsour sat down again and picked up his drink. “And now, boys, I would like you to please tell us.” He touched his hands together at the fingertips and contemplated the resultant structure. “What is the worst thing you have ever done in your whole, entire life?” He had asked this question of a thousand students over the past twenty years, and he paused after the fifth and ninth words in a way he had discovered to be particularly effective in eliciting a juicy response. “You, Mister, er—” He nodded his head at Levine. “Levine, I am sorry. You try first.”

In the candlelight my friend’s face looked warm and flushed, and although I didn’t know the reason, I could see that he was about to unburden himself of success. He uncoiled the tie from around his neck and cast it on the table, then turned to face me, as did Baldwin, Jewel, and Mehmet Monsour.

“After you,” he said.

I suppose cuckoldry, charlatanism, and academic corruption are not the only things that could have produced a feeling of unease like the one that now suffused the dinner party. It was as though we all knew that there had been a mild poison in the food, which was now taking effect, and we knew as well who the poisoner was, and we all knew that we knew. It was that sort of unease; the sort generated by a family on the brink of divorce or a team of researchers at work on a new type of death ray. I felt the frank encouragement of Jewel’s fingertips on my thigh, pressing me to injure a man who was in some measure eagerly anticipating his injury, but her face, like her husband’s and Monsour’s and Levine’s, and, I imagine, like my own, was uncertain and a little pinched.

Fortunately I had the presence of mind to tell the truth. I told them that as a child I had had a reputation for honesty and probity of which I felt miserably undeserving. I said, shame already beginning to mount in my belly, that one summer evening I had gone barefoot down the sidewalk in our deserted neighborhood, set free from the dinner table earlier than anyone else. I had heard a distant lawnmower, a sprinkler, TV gunfire. I had passed the garage of a friend named Mike, who just that day, I knew, had been given a new toy car; the garage door was raised and I could see a card table on which stood some jars of model paint, a half-constructed model bomber, and the new red Matchbox. For no particular reason at all I grabbed a brush and a jar of silver paint and blotted out the windshield and rear window of the toy, threw it to the ground, stepped on it, and then ran home. The horrible part had been afterward, when I returned to Mike’s house to find all the neighborhood children standing around denying that they had been vandals. “Smith didn’t do it,” Mike’s older brother had said. “That’s for sure, anyway.” That night as I got ready for bed I had discovered two streaks of glitter on the sole of my foot.