8.
Schemed
DOC WAS PISSED, and why shouldn’t he be? The associate dean of research and operations had caught wind of Dr. Thomas Hock’s experiments and was concerned. Doc always paid little attention to the man. He refused to call him by his name, only by his title. In Doc’s view, the associate dean of research and operations was a quirk of the organizational chart, his accidental superior. “The associate dean of research and operations wants to talk with me,” he told Stuart a few days after the burial. “The associate dean of research and operations wants to shut us down.”
“Can he do that?” asked Stuart. “ I thought you had ‘latitude.’”
“The associate dean of research and operations is never explicit, never direct, never — god no — confrontational. He just inflicts us with a thousand small tasks. Rubric design. Performance benchmarks. Data collection schemes to monitor the intellectual contributions of our Hegelian philosophy candidates. The man has no vision, his worldview is completely stymied by measurable goals. He flagellates himself with yardsticks.”
“We’re through? What about Veronica?
“No, we’re not through. I told him how straight down the line we are heading with this.”
Doctor Hock told the associate dean of research and operations where they were heading. Toward a vision, a manifesto, a mission for the greater portion of the university. He told him in a demonstratively tidy office, where the associate dean of research and operations sits back in his dimpled chair and affects the posture and stylings of a black-and-white holographic business executive cast out of the last century, with wet chromatic hair and a white lapel.
“Fear is the new curriculum,” said Doc. “The end of the last century we declared war on terror. A quixotic and laughable objective for a military, paradoxical and unabashedly Orwellian. Fire with fire. It’s always been the poets, the bards and novelists, the playwrights, the philosophers and theorists, the cineastes and the critics, the journalists, the historians and curators, whose vocation it is to confront the deep existential crises that threaten to crater the human spirit.
“We need a return, a redemption of that mission — we need the address of fear on every assignment, rather than fools’ errands and the continued manufacture of myopic half-human professionals who retreat anxiously into their daily errands, who sink headlong into mass political, social, and economic terror and into a constant nervous state of unspeakable — because they have no words or examples for it — dread.”
The associate dean wore his most practiced professional grimace.
“Until we reset ourselves, re-ordain ourselves to confront, contextualize, historicize, visualize, name and understand fear, and stop cranking out people who make our weapons, finance our self-destruction, code and manipulate our prejudices, network our amusements, and keep us going day by day to the end of days, we will have given up this institution’s higher calling from its origins — monks hunched over manuscripts in continuous —“
“Yes, Thomas,” interrupted the associate dean. “What about the girl?”
“The woman who has no fear will be our emblem and seal. Our Helen of Troy. Our Calliope—”
The associate dean had switched to his most practiced air of careful consideration.
“And we need her for our slick brochures,” Doc continued, “and for our social media presence and buzz. We need to get people excited. We need stories.”
The associate dean closed the sleeping laptop on his desk. He felt the drain of his resolve with the onset of intellectual fatigue. The faculty always raise their eyes and say Doc brims over with pseudo-intellectual bombast. He talks too much and is largely full of it. But no one denies he believes in it.
The associate dean sized up the situation and looked for a way out. Doc had finally sat down. His legs were crossed but he bent aggressively forward. His expression was indignant. The associate dean took a long breath. He raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Still doing triathlons?”
“Now and then.”
“Give me 40 push-ups and I’ll approve your little vision quest.”
..
Stuart dropped the bracelets on the table. “Did you really do 40 push-ups in his office?”
“Yep. Tried not to sweat. When I left I did a hammy bow because I was so out of breath, couldn’t say anything.”
“So we’re back on?”
“Never left.”
Stuart nodded. “I’ve been thinking.” Doc took a seat. “Why don’t we just make it up from now on? We just round-table with Veronica when she comes over and concoct some pretty great tales.”
Doc shook his head. “We can’t do that. Fiction no longer travels, and it certainly doesn’t stick around. Besides, all the stories have been written. Now we just have to stand by, wait a bit, and see what this marvelously crumbling universe reveals behind the old facades. Besides, fascination in this century is too broad, too indiscriminate. Everything’s enthralling. The majority of our daily correspondence consists of links, dumps, and screenshots so we can say See! We’re all giggling Cassandras hoping to assuage our inveterate anxiety by throwing watch parties to the same cataclysmic events. No, we need something big and real, something to hit people in the gut, something vivid and spectacular. Debord had warned us 70 years ago about the spectacle. But we know what warnings do, don’t we?“
Stuart fell to busying himself with Veronica‘s bracelets, troubleshooting the tiny buttons with the tip of his finger or just tracing the contours.
“From sci-fi dystopia to bioethical conundrums to political jeremiads, when you warn the public about the future, you have just predestined it. It becomes the place in which people live, and they start jockeying for positions. We need out of this wasteland to show people fear in a handful of dust, but then see who, and what kind of person, comes out of the grave unfazed.
“By the way, did you find anything about the man from the tunnel this weekend?”
“I went back Sunday and Monday night at the same time, but no luck.”
“That’s okay, who needs him? One of the art students snapped his picture. It’s great. Just a silhouette backlit by the light of the tunnel. It looks like a Billy Wilder picture. And we have snapshots of the coffin, before and after.”
“Great,” said Stuart, coupling the bracelets and laying them on the table. “So what’s next? Something spectacular?”
“I think so,” Doc smiled.
“Clowns, crowds, disease, ghosts?”
“Serial killer.” Doc flashed his eyes.