Уолтер Мосли - John Woman

His alienation from culture and community cocooned or camouflaged John in nonentity. He breathed in deeply and returned to the kitchen. There he sat, not writing or even thinking much. Now and again he’d run the tip of an index finger over the smooth finish of the cherrywood table. The sensation was almost imperceptible.

A solitary beam of muted sunlight struck the far end of the tabletop. John was thinking that light had mass, that there was weight even to that faint illumination on a plank of wood.

At 12:47 p.m. he was once again walking down North Violet Lane toward the Great Rotunda. The past two days were jumbled but not lost to him. There were touchstones of thought: Carlinda, Senta, Chapman Lorraine, the dark-skinned fairy godmother and his first lover, Colette Margolis — now his nemesis.

His misdeeds would be touted online and in tabloids for the next few days.

He took the stairs two at a time to the fifth floor of the gigantic canister of education. At 1:01 the entire class was in attendance, plus two more.

There was a serious-looking black male student sitting in the front row wearing a black T-shirt, army fatigue pants and five or six thick silver bracelets on his left wrist. At the far left in the otherwise unpopulated fifth row sat an older man in a gray suit. He had on a dress shirt but wore no tie, sporting silver, not gray, hair. His face was economical and somehow sculpted. This, John knew, was the professional board member Willie Pepperdine.

The young professor glanced around the class but when his eyes met Carlinda’s she looked down. This was no surprise. He wondered if she had confessed her infidelity to a girlfriend or maybe even to Arnold. It wasn’t a good time for that kind of notoriety.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “I know I had you reading Winch and Wittgenstein but we’re going to put off discussing them for the time being. Instead I’d like to talk about the implications of the theory of a finite universe and the impact this might have on the study of history.”

With these words John Woman started his spur-of-the-moment lecture.

“Some physicists believe the universe to be finite, that this limited existence’s absolute god is gravity. Gravity explodes with love creating existence, then recoils in horror at what it has made. It draws back into the primal atom; then, forgetting revulsion, it explodes again...”

For the next fifty minutes or so he spoke of the ancient Hindu belief in reincarnation and Nietzsche’s dictum of eternal recurrence not only of life but of the entire physical world.

“Within this philosophy,” he lectured, “science is subsumed. History in its most absolute and unknowable form locks itself into a pattern of repetition and our ability to know it becomes an act of faith.”

“But Professor,” a young man with olive-brown skin said.

“Yes?”

“Claude Hernandez,” the student said, “from New Orleans, second-year student, majoring in American history.”

“Yes, Mr. Hernandez.”

“What use is this kind of thinking? I mean, if we can’t know history and are condemned to repeat it then what’s to study?”

John hadn’t considered why he’d decided on this lecture; it was one of many tools he used to break up rote thinking. But with this question he understood that his tenure as a professor was just an extension of the lessons his father had taught him; that his entire life, even the murder of Chapman Lorraine, was merely assignment.

“Amor fati,” he said to Claude Hernandez.

The student from Louisiana frowned and cocked his head to the side.

John looked around the room. The man he assumed to be Willie Pepperdine was grinning.

“Amor fati,” the professor repeated.

Carlinda made a sound.

“Yes, Miss Elmsford?”

“Love fate. It’s, it’s Latin.”

“And what does this Latin phrase mean to you?”

They could have been fucking on his window ledge under the protective lunar glow.

“It,” she said and paused. “It means that one has to accept fate but more than that, it means that you can, you should love what is meant to be.”

Carlinda exhaled as if she had been holding a breath.

“Exactly,” John agreed. “The elephant I spoke of Tuesday has now become the universe. Our limited ability to study this behemoth is informed not by knowledge but by our attitude toward the study.”

There were many questions after that. John bantered and argued, learned names and felt more and more relaxed. They quarreled over free will and entropy, the apparently obvious unfolding of the past into the future and the loss of faith that many feared they would have if they accepted the concept of amor fati.

In response to these fears he said, “My job has two main objectives. The first is to teach you how to think about history. The second is to dissuade you from following that path of study.”

“To per suade us, Professor?” Tamala Marman asked.

John smiled. “No, Ms. Marman — diss uade. It is my experience that the profession of history is a harsh taskmaster; that anyone embarking on that road should be aware of the tribulations they will encounter.”

“Shouldn’t we make those decisions ourselves?”

“Of course you should. But your resolve must be based on something. The lectures, class assignments and private meetings with every professor at this school will influence your decisions. It is my position that if you take your chosen vocation to heart you may, as many do today, experience the threat of heartbreak.”

Soon after John dismissed the class. They filed through the red-rimmed doorway looking somber. Carlinda faltered at the threshold, then passed through.

Soon the only students left were Willie Pepperdine and the young black man in silver bracelets and quasi-military dress.

The younger man approached John first.

“Do you have a minute, Professor Woman?” he asked.

“Office hours are from four to six at number eighteen Southeast Green Garden Path.”

The young man’s brow furrowed ever so slightly. He would have been good looking but somewhere along the way his confidence had transformed into anger and the delicate features of his dark face did not hold anger well.

“I was hoping we could talk,” the student said.

“What’s your name?”

“Johann Malik.”

“Pick any time between four and six, Johann. That will be your time.”

“What are you doing right now?”

“Or you could just drop by and take your chances. The first few weeks are usually pretty slow.”

“We could grab a coffee in the rotunda,” the glowering student offered.

“Between four and six.”

Johann Malik looked over at the elder white man in the fifth row, grunted, then stalked out of the classroom, silver bracelets clanking like manacles.

“Masterful,” the man in the fifth row said. His tone was strong and rich; baritone tessitura, John said to himself.

“Mr. Pepperdine?”

“You got me.”

John went to the fourth tier and sat.

“What can I do for you, sir?”

“Willie.”

The Platinum Path board member, maybe even one of The Dozen, was handsome in a fabricated way. The face was perfectly balanced but his steel gray eyes spoke of the scars and indulgences of a mercenary or pirate.

“Willie,” John repeated.

“I want to learn from you.”

“Excuse me if I’m a little mystified, Willie, but I can’t imagine a professor in an obscure branch of study could in any way edify a worldly individual like yourself.”

“I don’t know. I learned something today.”

“And what is that?”

“Everything I believe instinctively has a basis as old as ancient India and Egypt; that an upstart nation like Rome had scholars who knew what I’d be thinking nearly two thousand years before I was born.”