Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

“They were going to beat him up , Stan.”

“More likely they were going to hire someone to do it,” he said, an odd reasonableness in his voice.

“A hitman!”

“More like a thug,” he said. “Ed would have gotten a warning first.”

“The goddamned ingrates,” she said. “The filthy, degenerate sons of bitches. He gave the best years of his life to these animals. They don’t deserve him.”

“They’ll be disciplined,” Stan assured her.

“They should be expelled,” she said, and she wanted to continue, to say, They should be tarred and feathered. They should be run through with swords. They should be brought before a firing squad .

“They probably will be,” Stan said. “Listen. This isn’t about the threats, this is about Ed.” He paused. “And his work.”

Her heart was racing. It was the call she’d been fearing for a long time, and they still needed a year and a half to get to his thirty-year mark.

“Why are you calling me ?” she said, thinking it safest to mask her anxiety as incredulity. “Wouldn’t it be better to talk to him directly?”

“I’ve wanted to talk to Ed for a while, but he’s stopped talking to anybody. He pops into the department office to check his mailbox and leaves immediately. He shuffles through the halls with his head down. I left a note in his box, but he’s ignored it. I tried to stop him in the office to ask him to sit down, and he just brushed past me. I wanted to talk to him as a friend before I have to talk to him as his department chair. So I thought to call you.”

“I appreciate that,” she said, though she burned with resentment at the thought of this thoroughly average man, whom she’d hosted for dinner several times in Jackson Heights when he was a junior faculty member, claiming to speak as Ed’s chair, when the only reason he held the position in the first place was that Ed had refused it.

“It seems,” Stan said, “from what we’ve been able to reconstruct, that Ed was assigning the wrong grades to students. I saw the papers. Something was definitely going on. His fall grades were a mess.”

She didn’t know how the semester grades could have been a mess, because she’d supervised their tabulation. Maybe Ed had lost the sheet with the grades and had made a new one up at the last minute.

“I’m calling you,” Stan said, “because, well, did you know anything about problems he was having? Did Ed say anything?”

She felt cornered. “No,” she said. “I had no idea.”

“I need to know, Eileen. We’ve been colleagues, Ed and I, for over ten years. You know that Ed’s like family to me. What’s going on with him?”

He might have thought himself a friend, but he was calling as the department chair. “He’s had some headaches lately,” she said instinctively. “Migraines. He’s going in for a brain scan next week. They want to check for a tumor.”

“A tumor? Jesus, Eileen. I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you,” she said. “We’re hoping for the best.”

After she hung up the phone, she called Jasper Tate. Jasper was Ed’s protégé and partner on the grant research. His four-year-old daughter was Ed’s goddaughter. She told Jasper about her conversation with Stan but left out the part about the brain tumor.

“You must be shaken up,” he said.

“Can I trust you with something, Jasper? I mean, can I trust you not to speak to anyone about something?”

“Of course.”

“Ed loves you like a son,” she said.

“I feel the same way about him.”

She left a long pause on the line. “He’s got Alzheimer’s.”

“My God.”

“We don’t want anyone in the department to know.”

“Okay.”

“We want to keep him going a little longer. He wants to keep teaching.”

“Of course.”

“I lied to Stan.”

“What about?”

“I told him Ed’s being tested for a brain tumor.”

Jasper chuckled warmly. She felt the compression in her chest lift.

“I don’t mean to laugh,” he said, trying to pull the gravity back into his voice. “It’s just — Stan. He’s so… Stan .”

“No,” she said. “I needed that. This whole thing has been so unreal, so crazy.”

“I can cover for him,” Jasper said. “I’ll help him prepare for class. I’ll grade his things. His students can come to me for help.”

She knew what Ed would say to Jasper’s offer: I can’t do that to you, Tatey. You have important work to do. She felt at times as if she was on a long trek and had lost her compass many miles back. She knew she should probably not involve this lovely man in the dissembling.

“Maybe you can help for a little while,” she said.

“Yes. Great.”

“Do me one favor,” she said.

“Anything.”

“Play dumb. Don’t tell Ed we spoke. Just help him. He won’t notice the difference. With the grading, yes, you may have to say something. Let him feel like he’s doing you a favor. Maybe you want to compare the quality of work in different sections, I don’t know. I don’t need to explain Ed to you. So far as he knows, this conversation never happened.”

• • •

A week later, she called Stan and told him they had ruled out a tumor but had no lead yet about what else might be causing Ed’s sluggishness. She said she would get back to him as soon as she had a better sense of what was going on.

The next morning, she grabbed Ed as he was headed to work. “You leave there as soon as you’re done teaching,” she said. “You understand?”

He nodded.

“Don’t get into conversations with anyone. Not your students, no one. Only Jasper Tate.”

He nodded again.

“If you do find yourself in a conversation,” she said, “under no circumstances are you to tell anyone that you’ve been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”

“What’s Alzheimer’s?” he asked, and she felt her spirit breaking, until she looked at him and saw the outline of an impish grin forming on his face.

“Don’t you start with me,” she said, but she was thinking, Lord, don’t let this part of his personality die just yet. If you need ideas for other parts to take away first, I can make a list.

Ed was already asleep when the phone rang. She’d been dreading the call for a month.

“Things have gotten worse,” Stan said. “He’s got to come out of the classroom. For his sake, for the students.”

She put a pot of water on to try to calm herself down. The wind howled and rattled against the kitchen window.

“If you think that’s best,” she said. “What’s the administrative protocol? Do you have some rubber room you’ll put him in?”

“I was thinking he’d retire.”

“He has no interest in retiring,” she said. “He has fifteen years before he even thinks about retiring.”

“He can’t do the job anymore, Eileen.”

“He has rights as a tenured professor. He’s supposed to be given time to take corrective action, isn’t he?”

“It would be good for the department if he retired.”

She felt herself begin to shake, more in fear than in anger. She couldn’t help wishing she could turn to Ed for advice; he was always clear-sighted at times like these. She knew it would be hell for him if she forced him to keep going to work. He would be in an adversarial relationship with his department; they would be looking for signs of incompetence.

“I don’t give a damn about the department,” she said. “He’s given enough to the department. I’m interested in my husband.” Her mind was working feverishly. Every passing second would erode her bargaining position. She tried to think like Ed. Ed would have worked out some algorithm in his deep subconscious to produce the right answer. He would have seen it from the beginning. “He could probably sit there for two years,” she said. “That’s how long the review process would take, especially for someone with as exemplary a record as Ed.”